Labyrinth
by Zettel
Summary: AU novella. Dialogue in Limbo. Chuck Bartowski downloads the Intersect and becomes a prisoner in the same night. Is the stranger in the facing cell a friend or a foe? How can he tell in the darkness?
1. Unit One: Facing

Chuck Bartowski downloads the Intersect and becomes a prisoner in the same night. Who has taken him and why? Is the stranger discovered in the facing cell a friend or a foe?

* * *

A/N: This will be one of the only A/N with this fic. The story restarts, AU, and with a different-featured Intersect. Only a handful of chapters.

* * *

**Labyrinth**

* * *

Unit One: Facing

* * *

_LAB'YRINTH, _noun [Latin labyrinthus; Gr.]

1\. Among the ancients, an edifice or place full of intricacies, or formed with winding passages, which rendered it difficult to find the way from the interior to the entrance. The most remarkable of these edifices mentioned, are the Egyptian and the Cretan labyrinths.  
2\. A maze; an inexplicable difficulty.  
3\. Formerly, an ornamental maze or wilderness in gardens.  
4\. A cavity in the ear.

* * *

Chuck watched his computer screen effloresce. He felt his mind inflate, balloon, then burst.

His knees gave and he sank into a black-on-black bottomless blackness.

* * *

...

* * *

Chuck woke up and opened his eyes.

He was still in blackness. He blinked, tried to clear his vision. But it was clear; he just could not see. A bag, some dense, dark material, was over his head. For a panicked second, he had an attack of claustrophobia, and he tried to reach for the bag, yank it off, get a full breath of fresh air. But his hands were cuffed and anchored down and he could not raise them to his head. He heard a voice, gruff, male.

"He's awake."

A second voice, frustrated, female.

"Tranq the bastard."

A pinprick in the shoulder. Chuck stopped seeing the black innards of the bag and sank again into the black innards of his head.

* * *

...

* * *

Shudder.

Chuck woke up again. He was still in the dark - but after a moment, he recognized that the dark neither was inner darkness, unconsciousness, nor was it the closed, stale darkness of the bag. It was outer darkness - he was in a dark _place_.

_Outer darkness, weeping and gnashing of teeth. -Wait, where did that thought come from?_

His head ached, and the ache radiated to his feet. No, 'ache' was too weak a word. His head was in continued extreme physical grief. He was a reanimated cadaver. His head was too heavy for his body, as if his brain had ossified, become dense and ponderous bone.

He was half-seated, half-supine, uncomfortable. Feeling gingerly with his hands, he could tell that he was wedged in a corner, his shoulders against the two converging walls, his body mostly on the floor, like he had been discarded there, dropped, a bag of trash.

The floor was concrete. The walls too. Dank. Damp and cold.

He was no longer handcuffed. Inventorying himself, he realized he still had on the clothes he had been wearing when he looked at the email in his bedroom. But his feet were cold - his shoes, his Chucks - were gone. His socks too.

The movement made his head throb, as if the labyrinths of his inner ear, the cavities there, were cavities in an aching tooth. His hands cupped his head, his thumbs rubbed his temples, seeking to soothe the pain, his eyes closed.

When he opened his eyes again and dropped his hands, he realized his eyes were adjusting. Black had lightened into dark, dark grey. He could barely make out the gross anatomy of his environment. He _was_ wedged in a corner. He straightened himself to sit more comfortably, ignoring the intensified pain in his head, neck, and shoulders. Ignoring it - but he could not stifle a groan.

He strained to see. A cell. He was in a cell. He could make out bars, vertical, a few feet away. Blinking again and straining more, he could see that beyond the bars was more concrete floor, a narrow strip, and then another set of bars. But he could not make out anything beyond that second set of bars, - whatever it was, if it was anything at all, it was for him no more than a host of generic shapes too dark to count or name.

He closed his eyes, hoping to get them to adjust better to the darkness.

It was his birthday.

_Happy birthday to me, Happy Birthday to me, Happy birthday, dear Chuu-uuck, Happy Birthday to me! _The tune played in his head, blaring, off-speed, as if from the speaker of an ice cream truck.

Hell of a birthday. A birthday in hell. _Hell. _

Birthday. _Time_. He grabbed his right wrist with his left hand. Naked. His watch was missing. He felt around. They had emptied his front pockets, whoever they were. Man's voice. Woman's voice. _What had been in my pockets?_ _Bilbo's guessing game._ A couple of paperclips. A stubby putt-putt pencil to take notes. A pocket notebook. A guitar pick. Two final breath mints in their remaining paper-and-foil wrapping.

No treasures.

But that they were missing - his watch, missing - pissed him off. He forced himself up, sliding along the slimy wall until he was almost standing, then using his hands to push himself away from the wall. He almost pushed too hard, not expecting the dizziness that accompanied the change in posture. Tottering, an unsettled needle on a Geiger counter register, he finally found his balance, straightened, upright.

"Careful. You'll fall."

A woman's voice from the darkness, from beyond both sets of bars. Chuck blinked and strained but he could see no one. It did not sound like the woman's voice from before, the one he heard when he was bagged.

"Where am I?"

The darkness did not answer and he began to think he had hallucinated the voice.

But then: "Plural."

"Plural?"

"Where are _we_? - I seem to be in your predicament, or you are in mine." The voice was cool, controlled. The tone was, given the circumstances, pleasant. But the pleasantness was chosen, exhibited, not spontaneous.

Chuck recalled a theater class at Stanford he had attended for a few days before dropping it. He knew that peculiar tone - an actress's tone.

The hairs on his neck stood up, his flesh goose-pimpled. He decided to act too, to choose and control his tone.

"Um...okay..._We_. Are you asking the question or just correcting mine?" Chuck intended to match her cool, controlled tone - but then he remembered why he dropped the theater class. He was no actor. He sounded petulant and afraid - and a little pissed.

"I'm asking the corrected question." He heard a hint of amusement in her otherwise still-controlled voice.

"I don't know where we are. I was at home - recovering from the birthday party my sister threw for me, and…" He stopped. Perhaps he was giving too much away. He couldn't control his tone, but maybe he could - and should - control his tongue.

"And?"

"And, well, _yada yada yada_ and I am here, wherever here is...this damp inky nothing."

The voice was silent. "'Yada yada yada'?"

"Yeah," Chuck said, momentarily forgetting where he was, what was happening, "you know, _Seinfeld._"

The voice responded automatically, clipped, bristling. "Is that a code word, a shibboleth?"

_Shibboleth: The criterion of a party; or that which distinguishes one party from another; and usually some peculiarity in things of little importance. - Since when is there a dictionary in my head? _ _Code word?_

"Huh?"

The voice was silent.

Chuck filed the question away. "It's a TV show, a sitcom. A show about nothing."

More silence. Then: "How can a TV show be about nothing? Isn't it at least about the characters?" The tone of the voice became harder to understand - maybe icy, genuinely icy, but maybe the iciness, if that was the right term, was forced. A still-liquid drop of amusement seemed to drip from the iciness. Whether the drop represented thawing or freezing, Chuck could not tell.

"Good question. The show is about characters who are pitching a TV show about nothing, so the show is about itself, in a sense, but the show it's about is a show about nothing, so the show is a show about nothing."

An almost immediate response: "What did you just say? Did you just manage to say nothing while explaining a show about nothing?"

Chuck laughed - but the laugh rang dully against the dank walls and he suddenly recalled where he was, wherever he was.

He thought he heard her chuckle but so softly he was unsure of his ears.

"Who are you?"

He heard her exhale. "Who are you?"

Chuck felt a flush of frustration. "Who are _we_?"

This time he did hear her chuckle. "That seems to be our question, doesn't it?"

She exhaled again.

Her next comment was spoken carefully as if she recognized his frustration and wanted to allay it a little, but she also seemed surprised at herself. "My name is Sarah."

_Sarah. _Chuck's head seemed to buzz. He did not understand how but it was as though he knew that she was not telling the truth. She was not lying but that was not her name. _How can I know that? How can I know that I know that?_ It was as if he had a sixth sense or a third eye or...a third ear. _Is a third ear even a thing? _

All he knew was that what she said was audibly off-color. _Like that makes sense_. _Untrue, if not a lie._

Not wanting to test his third ear against his own voice, Chuck responded with the truth. "I'm Chuck."

"'Chuck'? Not really?"

"Oh, yes, really. My parents rejected a number of equally exciting, career-enhancing, romance-insuring options, 'Horatio', 'Reginald', 'Darth'..."

"'Darth'? Is that a name - or a sound effect?"

"Ha! Well, it was a joke, actually, just now. I don't _think _my parents ever considered that name, as they did the other two. But it is a name. 'Darth' - as in 'Darth Vadar', Star Wars' villain in black."

"Huh." Clearly, none of that meant anything to her.

"So, Sarah, if we know who we are but not how we got here, maybe we can try to figure out, reconstruct, how we got here?"

Silence. A huff. "That's reasonable, I suppose. You start."

"Expected that - I have to say, Sarah."

She laughed. "Don't get too familiar. We don't _know_ each other, Chuck."

"No, we don't." He felt that Sarah was unknown by anyone and knew no one, not in the sense of real acquaintance. He realized that _that_ was the tone he had heard - iciness, yes, coldness, but a frost of isolation, aloneness. It was not directed at him - or not at him personally. She directed it at the world, and at him only as one of its denizens.

He was feeling better. Not well, not yet, not close — but better.

His headache remained but it had retreated into the darkness of his head. The darkness outside it seemed to lessen a bit more. During the conversation, his eyes had continued to adjust. He still could not see Sarah but he could see the bars of her cell, and just past them, into her cell. He could see none of that clearly enough to make out details, and Sarah must have been seated against the wall of her cell.

The darkness around her was too deep for him to see into it.

He turned and looked around his own cell, rotating in place. He could see a narrow cot attached to the back wall. There was a toilet - it seemed to be stainless steel but in the darkness, it was hard to tell. Attached to the toilet was a shallow sink with a faucet. Other than that, the cell was empty.

"Do you think it is safe for us to talk in here?"

"Yes."

The answer and the answer's not setting off the lie-detector in his head surprised him. "How can you know?"

"I had some items...hidden on me when they...when I ended up here. One was a bug-detector. I swept my cell while you were out - the range should be enough to have detected anything in yours too. Nothing showed up."

_A picture in his head - a menu of bug-detectors disguised as other things. Hair combs, ink pens, bracelets. Like the pages of a mail-order magazine for spies. _

_Spies? _

_This makes no sense. _He decided to play along. He and Morgan had been playing spies, escaping from his party. That had been in the dark too.

"Should be enough?"

"It's a game of inches, Chuck; I can't be sure, but I feel safe enough. They seem more interested in knowing where we are than in hearing what we say."

"They?"

"Yes, 'they', I don't know who they are, Chuck."

"I wish I could see you."

"No, you don't."

Chuck did not know how to respond to that. "Okay, so you want to know how I got here, or as much as I can remember?"

"Yes."

"I was at my birthday party. My sister threw it for me. Invited lots of people - mostly single nurses and doctors who work with her, she - her name is Ellie - is a doctor. I...um...let's just leave it at this: I disappointed her."

"'Disappointed'? How?"

Chuck had not expected a follow-up. "I was...ah...single but didn't mingle."

"Ha!" Her sudden laugh caused Chuck to jump.

She went on. "So, you weren't interested in...playing doctor?" The question ended hesitantly, despite the earlier laugh, almost as if she were frightened of her own joke.

This time, Chuck laughed. "Hey, that's good, O Lady of the Dark. But, yeah, that's right too. I didn't want to...play doctor."

"No one attractive enough?"

"No, no, it's not that. My sister has good taste - well, in everything but siblings and it'd be unfair to blame me on her. I just happened along; she's the eldest."

"Uh-huh. I imagine she wasn't happy about so many stethoscopes and so little deep breathing…"

Chuck barked a laugh that bounced around the damp walls. The echo brought him back to the situation, which he had somehow managed to forget, talking to Sarah.

He responded much more quietly. "Hey, you're funny for someone trapped in the dark."

She chuckled softly. Chuck asked, puzzled: "Did I say something funny?"

"No, but you called me funny, and no one - especially not me - thinks I am funny."

"Huh? Well, you are. And I know funny. I've faced myself in the mirror for _lo! _these twenty-eight years."

"28th birthday then?"

"Yes, nearly thirty and still a man-child with a man-child's job and a man-child's living arrangement."

"Oh?"

"I live with Ellie and her husband-to-be. People may not think you're funny, but at least not everyone knows you are a joke."

"You don't sound like a joke to me, Chuck."

Chuck huffed, partly because the situation was making him panicky again, partly because of what Sarah said.

He sat down on the floor, closer to his bars. "Have you ever heard that story about the prisoners who've been imprisoned together so long they've memorized and numbered all the jokes they know, so that every now and then one calls out a number, like '12!', and everyone laughs?"

"No, never heard it."

"Well, I think my birthdays are like that: …'26!', laugh, '27!', laugh, '28!', laugh - although 28 is looking more like a bad dream than a good joke."

Sarah seemed to hear the panic he was fighting in himself. "Don't freak out, Chuck. As long as there's life, there's hope."

"Geez, no _Seinfeld_, no joke repertoire to speak of, but a fund of Hallmark bromides?"

"Did you really just say 'fund of Hallmark bromides'?"

Chuck felt sheepish. "I guess I did...I almost-graduated smart."

"'Almost-graduated'?"

Chuck shook his head and then remembered she could not see it. "Why do you keep repeating what I say?"

"'Do I keep repeating what you say?"

"Good Lord!"

"Sorry. I just find your...style of talking to be..._unique_."

"'Unique'? Now I feel like a museum exhibit. The Incredible Talky Man. Step right up and hear him say things that only an underemployed, overly verbal loser would say."

"I never called you a loser. I...like the way you talk. It's...unpredictable." She was telling the truth.

"Yeah, what fresh self-humiliation will I let slip next?"

She laughed quietly. "See what I mean?"

Chuck made himself get back to her earlier question.

"So, I made Ellie mad at her own party for me. Very _Alice in Wonderland, _now that I think about it...And then I went to my room, after a...confrontation...with hatter-mad Ellie - and I had a birthday email from an old…friend. We went to college together but he graduated and I left by...a side door. I opened the email and my head exploded…"

"Porn?"

"No, Sarah, geez, _no_...No, I have a friend, Morgan Grimes, who is not above that sort of thing. He has a...firm fixation on a flexible blonde named 'Irene'...But no, Morgan knows better and...Bryce would not send me _porn_. I have no idea why he would send _me_...anything at all."

The facing darkness had become intensely silent. Chuck waited for some sign that Sarah was still listening. A moment passed. Two. Three.

Four. "Bryce?"

Chuck threw his hands up, a slightly bitter gesture. "There you go again, repeating my words. And yes, _Bryce_. Bryce Larkin. CPA. BMOC. Other endless, heroic, alphabetic titles. No doubt, even now, he's working on some beautiful client's _bottom line._"

The silence was intense again. One. Two. Three. Four.

Five. "And your name is 'Chuck'? Like _Charles_?"

"Yes, _Charles I. Bartowski_, at your service." He gave her a sweeping formal bow, a twirl of his hand, all pointless in the dark, but his circus ringmaster's voice made obvious what he had done.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

Six. "_Charles Bartowski_...An email from _Bryce Larkin_..."

"Yes, I know these are just names to you."

"Chuck, please, be quiet. I need to think."

Chuck stood up, chastened. "What about?"

"Nothing," she breathed out finally. Chuck's head buzzed. _That was a lie. But I would have known that without the internal buzzing, right?_

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six.

Seven. _Spies_. _What game am I playing? _Shudder. Headache. Chuck broke the silence. "How did _you_ get here?"


	2. Unit Two: Shame

Chuck Bartowski downloads the Intersect and becomes a prisoner in the same night. Who has taken him and why? Is the stranger in the facing cell a friend or a foe?

* * *

**Labyrinth**

* * *

Unit Two: Confusion of Face

* * *

_SHAME__, _noun

1\. A painful sensation excited by a consciousness of guilt, or of having done something which injures reputation; or by of that which nature or modesty prompts us to conceal. Shame is particularly excited by the disclosure of actions which, in the view of men, are mean and degrading. Hence it is often or always manifested by a downcast look or by blushes, called confusion of face.

2\. The cause or reason of shame; that which brings reproach, and degrades a person in the estimation of others. Thus an idol is called a shame.

* * *

Sarah did not answer.

Chuck stood and waited. He tapped crossed his arms, tapped his foot. The first was a futile posture in the dark, the second less effective since he was barefoot. The longer he waited, the more the situation settled on him — the dank darkness, the headache...the fear. Somehow, talking to Sarah had staved the fear off, until she stopped talking and he had time to think more about where he was than who he was with.

Tap. Tap. Tap. Fear clenching his stomach. _Code words, shibboleths, bug-detectors...They, whoever they are. What the hell did Bryce send me — and what did it do to me?_

Tap. Tap. Tap.

"Did they take your shoes too, Chuck?" It was not an answer to his question but he was overwhelmingly, absurdly glad of her question. Her voice.

"Yes, and my feet are cold. You?"

"Yes, and my feet are freezing."

"So, where were you when you were last shod?"

"'Shod'?"

"Sarah, please…"

"Sorry, Chuck. I just needed to think for a minute. Process all this."

"Well, it's freaking me out and you aren't helping. I feel like it is all processing me. Like Cheez Whiz — pasteurized, processed cheese food. I am becoming pasteurized, processed _Chuck_ food. _Chuck Whiz. _No, wait, that sounded wrong. Sarah, please answer me."

Chuck thought he heard her change position. He realized then that it had gotten darker in his cell, in the cells. He could now barely make out the bars on his own cell and Sarah's was sunk in blackness.

"I was in my apartment."

"If you don't mind me asking, where in LA do you live?"

"I don't live in LA, Chuck. I live...I live in DC."

Chuck felt a shudder again. "So, where the hell are we? LA, DC, where? And why is it getting darker in here?" He did not pause for an answer. The fear and panic had him in their sway. "They drugged me, right? I heard the word 'tranq'. Some woman said it. Could the tranq be blinding me? Am I going to go blind in the dark?"

"Chuck!"

He stopped. Reeled himself in. "Sorry, I…"

"Look, Chuck, I get it. I'm...worried too. And to answer your question, sort of, I don't know where we are. I was in my apartment in DC, packing for...a work thing...and the next thing I know I am here. I woke up and surveyed my surroundings, and I heard you breathing…"

"Breathing?"

"Snoring. Not bad, but a little. So, I knew I wasn't alone."

Again, Chuck had a feeling that Sarah was often, mostly, alone. Nothing she said caused his head to buzz, so it was all true. But it was also vague.

"A work thing?"

"I travel."

"Right. Packing. You travel because…" Chuck stretched out the pause, "...you are a spy."

She exhaled slowly. "What makes you think that?"

"I suspect," Chuck said, "that neither of us was quite ourselves when we started talking. I mean, you were undoubtedly more yourself than me…"

"'Undoubtedly'?"

Chuck let the question go, annoying though it was. "But you let that question about code words slip. The bug-detector stuff too. That all sounds very 007."

Sarah laughed. "Not really. I am not a spy like you think. I work for a financial conglomerate, specializing in corporate espionage. I don't do it — I stop it. I was about to head out on a high profile assignment, patent stuff, and I thought this had something to do with that, that it somehow involved you."

Chuck's head was buzzing as if hornets had colonized it. She was lying. And she was good at it. The whole speech was effortless but not polished; it sounded genuine. _How can I do this? _It had to have been whatever Bryce sent him, but all he could remember after the screen started were two or three disconnected, dreamlike images.

He remembered once reading an essay by Oliver Sacks. It mentioned people who had certain kinds of head injuries or diseases and who could track when other people were lying, or at least when they were insincere. _Maybe Bryce's 'birthday present' injured my head. He injured my heart the last time, at Stanford. Jill…_

"Me, a corporate spy?"

"Right. I decided against that not long after you woke up...and started talking."

"I couldn't be part of corporate espionage. How could I?"

It took Sarah a second, a tell-tale second. "I said I'd decided against you being a corporate spy, Chuck, not against you being caught up in corporate espionage." She paused. He thought she was licking her lips, preparing to go on. "I think you've gotten caught in...my world."

Chuck's head buzzed until that last sentence. What was Sarah's world, if it wasn't corporate espionage? It was just plain, old espionage. 007. He was right. But she sounded regretful, like she was sorry — at least a little — that he was there, caught in whatever he was caught in.

He would continue to act as if he believed her. Corporate espionage. She did not seem to suspect he didn't believe her. More proof that she was a _practiced_ liar, not just a liar. She expected her lies to land, to succeed.

"And, I think it is getting darker here because it is getting darker outside. Wherever we are, it's the end of the day."

"But, that would mean I've lost at least a day." Chuck shook his head.

"At least, yes. Maybe over one."

"So, we not only don't know _where_ we are, we don't know _when_ we are?"

She did not answer his near-shout. He heard her move — and walk — for the first time. She came nearer the bars on her side but not close enough for him to discern anything except stirring shadow, deeper darkness in the deepening darkness.

She seemed to have a knack for remaining enshrouded.

"Chuck, calm down. Corporate espionage is a game of hardball, but it is rarely fatal."

Buzz. A lie. Her world was a fatal world.

"Have you ever hurt someone as part of your job, Sarah?"

"No." Buzz. But then she corrected herself. "That's not right. I have...hurt people but I never wanted to hurt people." No buzz: true. And not just true. She was ashamed. He could hear it in her voice, the trace of it. "My job...it's hard to do my job with clean hands. I suppose everyone who touches anything in it has dirty hands."

"So, we've moved from cold feet to dirty hands?"

Sarah laughed bitterly. "The two poles of my life…" Her voice shrank to nothing.

"As long as there's life, there's hope," Chuck offered, smiling in the dark toward her darkness.

She laughed again, less bitterly. "A Hallmark bromide from you, the Incredible Talky Man? And serving it back to me?"

Chuck forgot about her lies. He was just talking to her again.

"It couldn't have reached bromide status if there weren't some truth in it. Hope is good, Sarah. It's the stuff we're made of."

"Speak for yourself," she whispered, and he felt rather than saw her move back deeper into her cell.

Chuck's sympathy traveled away from him and tagged along with her. "Look, if I got caught up in your world, you must have some idea how it happened. Does it have something to do with Bryce...He's a CPA, so maybe he's involved in corporate espionage?" And then Chuck understood. "Wait, you said my name and his name...together. Not just serially. _You _think there is some connection. That...that _some connection _is the nothing you were thinking about. I'm here because of Bryce. You know of Bryce," - intuition seized him - "or you know Bryce."

Chuck heard Sarah sit down against the wall of her cell. He waited again, this time without folding his arms or tapping his still-numbing foot.

"Yes, there is some connection, I think. And, yes, I know...of Bryce."

Buzz. A lie. _But is it a lie of understatement or overstatement? _

"You've met him?"

A pause. "Yes, I have. Met him. We worked together...until my superiors came to believe he was working for the enemy. A double-agent. I haven't seen him in a long time." She sounded weary, defeated...alone. And ashamed again. "But I don't have any idea why he would have involved you in all...this."

All that was true — as stated. But it wasn't true about _corporate_ espionage. Bryce Larkin was not a fracking accountant; he was a spy. Like the woman in the dark. The partner of the woman in the dark. Sarah's partner. Chuck felt his hands curl into fists.

"You have no idea what he sent me?"

"Not really. I know he was part of a...project, that his company was working on Artificial Intelligence — human augmentation. I didn't know, my superiors didn't know, how far along the company's research had gotten. We found out too late. By then, he had stolen the project from his company and emailed it to you. We didn't know — and still don't know — what it does." She was quiet for a second and her voice changed, grew charged and complicated. "Does it do anything, Chuck? Have you noticed anything?"

She had not lied - again, as stated. Chuck would not answer but he couldn't refuse to say anything. "It's given me a massive, permanent headache," he paused and prepared himself, "but otherwise I've noticed nothing."

_Buzzzzzzzzz. _

Chuck remembered the first time Morgan had tricked him with one of those electric-shock handshake gag gifts. It felt like one went off in his head. Not just a buzz, a shock. His lie hurt. Chuck winced, shutting his eyes and twisting his features.

But Sarah could not see him wince and he must have done it silently. She did not react to anything but his words. "I guess that's good, although it must...be awful to have been caught up in all this because of...a dud program."

"At least the company — _you_, not your _company_, not the _corporate_ company — is good."

She snickered. "Not only has no one called me funny, but no one calls me good company, either."

"Huh."

"What's that mean?"

"Just _huh_ \- I'm expressing surprise."

She was quiet. "Why would you think I'm good company, Chuck?"

"Because about now I should be curled in a fetal position splitting the air with girlish screams. — No offense."

"None taken. It's been...an eternity since I was a girl."

"You don't sound so old."

"It's not the years, Chuck, it's the mileage. And I know, a cliché, not much of an improvement on a bromide. The last ten years have…They've...I've...I'm not happy, Chuck. Not about who I am or who I have been, who I've been practically forever. I can't remember when I was...the me I wanted to be...when I was a girl."

"Who was that? The _me_ you wanted to be. I mean the _you_ you wanted to be. I mean...you know…"

A ripple of laughter, soft, and it made Chuck feel close to her somehow, across the distance, through the bars, despite the dark. "I know, Chuck. And I don't know if I even know who she was...She...abandoned me during the years. Left me to be the _me_ I didn't want to be but seem to excel at being. Not that I understood all that, all along.

"Understanding it would have meant facing...the shame of my life. I've been on the run from that pain since I abandoned that girl...long before she abandoned me. I gave up on her before she gave up on me."

Chuck, feeling close to her and moved by her sad, soft voice, answered in kind. "I know something about abandonment. I...I lost my parents when I was young. Ellie raised me."

"I'm sorry, Chuck, about your parents."

"And I am sorry, Sarah, sorry about...the girl…"

Chuck heard her make a sound. A sob? He heard Sarah stand up. It was a moment before she spoke.

"We don't have time for this. I keep forgetting...We need to figure out what is going on. The company Bryce worked for, the rival company, they must believe that the program is not a dud. They took you to find out and kidnapped me to keep me from causing trouble. Why they put us together here is...hard to understand. They had to move one or both of us a distance. We might both be in DC or both be in LA or both be anywhere in between, maybe anywhere in the world."

"Do you think there's any chance we're in Paris?" Chuck could hear the hope in his own voice.

"Paris?"

"I've always wanted to see the Eiffel Tower. Have you, Sarah?"

"Seen the Eiffel Tower?"

Chuck stomped a foot and regretted it. His foot was not yet numb with cold. A jarring shock ran up from his foot, along his ankle, to his knee and continued its climb, exploding like a July Fourth rocket, multicolored pain in the dark of his cranium.

Sarah heard him whimper. "Chuck, are you okay?"

"Yes, I just kick-re-started my headache."

She walked to the bars. The darkness was so complete he could not see her at all. "Give me your hand."

He stuck his hand through the bars without thinking. He thought only after he felt her hand, cool at first then warm, as it held his. She turned his hand palm-up and she rubbed her thumb along the base of his, massaging his hand, her fingers pressed gently against the backs of his.

Her touch affected him - and out of all proportion. He shrank to the compass of his own palm and her hand was all of her, caressing and entangled with his, him. Their hands together were a chemistry class.

He heard her react, sigh, and he felt a tremor in her hand. He knew she could feel the one in his. She pulled her hand away. "Headache better?'

"Much," Chuck answered, too loud. His hand was still extended between the bars. "Thanks, that helped." Again, too loud.

She had affected him even more than he had known. Chuck could hear the confusion in his own loud voice as it echoed softly back at him. He blushed, thankful that Sarah could not see it.

"I'm glad." She was, but he heard a confusion in her voice too. "Chuck, I…"

Chuck heard something slide, then heard two puffs of air, felt a pinprick in his shoulder. He heard Sarah collapse and he collapsed too.

* * *

Sarah woke to a bright light. Artificial light. A bright light was shining into her face, blinding her. She thought of Chuck's words. "Very 007." She was strapped to a heavy metal chair, her arms bound to its arms, her legs to its legs.

"Agent Walker."

Sarah did not respond. The voice was inhuman, metallic - processed through an effect, making it neither male nor female, erasing any accent.

"Agent Walker."

Sarah relented, blinking into the light, spots of various colors floating in the air, afterimages, the results of the brightness. "Yes."

"Activation code: GSXW3434SWG995K76. Is this your activation code, Agent Walker?"

"Yes."

"If I have it, you know what that means…"

"I am to follow your commands exactly and without question."

"You understand I would use this code only under the direst conditions."

"I do."

The metallic voice paused. "Very good. We need to know what Fulcrum's Intersect does, and we need to know as soon as possible. Chuck Bartowski has downloaded it into himself. We must know what it has done to him, what it enables him to do."

"But he told me that it has not done anything, except make his head hurt."

"He is lying."

"He doesn't seem like a liar. Why would Fulcrum — why would Bryce Larkin — send the Intersect to Chuck, anyway?"

"We need to determine that too."

"I don't understand the whole situation."

"Who said you needed to? You only need to understand your orders."

Sarah had always had a hard time disobeying orders. She had never done it before, until once, recently, in Budapest. Could she do it again? Did she want to? What was she thinking? Her reputation was as all-job, unquestioning, unhesitant.

"My orders?"

"Get Chuck Bartowski to tell you what the Intersect has done to him, for him. Push him. Prompt him. Pull him. Do whatever you have to do to get him to tell you."

"Can't you just test him, take him to a lab?"

"No. The Intersect will only function…if he wills it to function, if he is willing. We must have his agreement"

Sarah's mind focused finally, the recent tranq releasing her enough to regain self-command.

"You want me to handle him. Seduce him…"

The metallic voice was silent. Then: "Whatever is necessary."

"You want to use him, make him _your_ Intersect."

"He will respond to you, to your personal touch. He will be your Intersect. And, in that way, ours."

She was not revolted by Chuck but she was by her orders. "And if I refuse?"

"You won't." Not a prediction, not a bit of theory, but a statement of Sarah's intention, authoritative - as if someone else could speak for her, and in a metallic voice.

"Agent Walker this mission is time-sensitive. You must have the Intersect...compliant...in twenty-four hours."

"In the dark? In separate cages?"

"We will soon eliminate the separation, but the darkness will...remain. We do not know how the Intersect will respond to visual stimuli, but we suspect it is only vision that triggers him. He responds to what he sees. We do not think his other sensory modalities are triggers."

"And if he is not _compliant_ in twenty-four hours?"

"Then we will kill him, and kill you. This will be contained here."

"So, if I...succeed...he and I...stay here." Not a question, a fact — she was sure of it.

"If you succeed, in time you may earn the right to come and go. The Intersect, however, is home. He will only leave here in a box - either sooner or later."

"But why me? Why won't you explain?"

Silence. Sarah heard the puff of a tranq gun again, felt the mosquito bite of the dart. The last dose had been fast-acting and short-lived.

As she slumped into darkness, she thought she would have to be fast-acting, or Chuck would be short-lived, and so would she.

* * *

A/N: AU, remember: things are different.


	3. Unit Three: Barings

Chuck Bartowski downloads the Intersect and becomes a prisoner in the same night. Who has taken him and why? Is the stranger in the facing cell a friend or a foe?

* * *

**Labyrinth**

* * *

Unit Three: Barings

* * *

_BARE_, adjective [This word is from opening, separating, stripping.]

1\. Naked, without covering; as, the arm is bare; the trees are bare.  
2\. With the head uncovered, from respect.  
3\. Plain; simple; unadorned; without the polish of refined manners.  
4\. Laid open to view; detected; no longer concealed.  
5\. Poor; destitute; indigent; empty; unfurnished.

* * *

Sarah shuddered, shook. All atremble, she woke.

Her first impression was of cold. She was cold. Icy. The Ice Queen. But her usual inner cold was not her problem — or, rather, her way of avoiding her problems, keeping them on ice, keeping herself numb, avoiding the guilt and shame of her life by freeze-drying it, so no tears could fall.

Her feet were cold, numb. The numbness extended up her legs. She felt cold all over. She sat up and felt the soft fabric around her readjust. It was not the fabric she had been wearing, the cotton of her earlier blouse. She touched the fabric. Terry cloth, thick, heavy. She was in a robe. And that was all. The robe was belted around her but the cold's long, probing fingers hand gotten inside it and her skin felt cold and clammy, felt as she imagined the eye of a dead fish at the market would feel had she ever dared touch one. She shook her head, clearing the bizarre image. Someone had undressed her while she was drugged. A sudden, deep feeling of violation overcame her — but it decreased as she checked herself. She seemed fine, undressed, yes, but also untouched.

And then she knew: she had been undressed for this, for this situation. She realized she was back in one cell - but she did not know which one. All she knew for sure was that she was not alone in it. She could hear Chuck's faint, now-familiar snore. He was beside her on the floor.

She reached out to him, her arm straightening in slow motion, and felt the same terry cloth she was wearing. She did not check further: she inferred that Chuck too was undressed and naked beneath his robe.

Sarah shuddered, shook. It was colder in the cell, colder than the fall of night would explain. A thermostat had been lowered. It was far too cold to be dressed in nothing but a robe. The ambient temperature was far lower than room temperature. She shuddered again.

They — whoever they were — were trying to force the issue, to force Sarah and Chuck into physical closeness to avoid the debilitating cold.

_Seduction._ There were many things about her CIA career Sarah did not like, hated even, but that most of all. Even though the term _officially_ implied the mere use of the promise of sex, not the keeping of the promise, Sarah loathed seduction and loathed herself for doing it.

She knew agents who thought of the actual keeping of the promise as a tool permissible to use, but Sarah had not been willing, not able, to alienate herself from her own body as that required. Sarah could see some point in thinking of her hands and feet as distinct enough from her that she could coherently conceive of them as weapons, tools, but her body was not _a part_ of her, _it was her_. It was not a tool — and could not be coherently understood as a one without a self-objectification that struck Sarah as a self-betrayal, a final forfeiture of what little integrity she had kept over the years. The surrender of the remnants of her autonomy. She had never been willing to see _herself _as a tool — even if the men she worked for and with — almost always _men_ — were willing, even happy to see her that way.

She reached out again to touch Chuck's robe. He shifted positions and she pulled her hand back, but he did not wake up. When she held his hand earlier and rubbed it, she had felt something, something in her she did not know was there had quickened, stirred. That something made the thought of seducing Chuck even more loathsome to her, more repulsive. It was the emotional equivalent of, well, _shitting the bed_, to put it coarsely. Although the chance of it happening was small, vanishingly small, the something she felt made her think that Chuck was a man with whom she could have a real relationship, real feelings, no pretenses, as had always been true in her prior 'relationships', even the longest one, the one with Bryce. Those 'relationships' had always been shaped by her spy life, not her spy life shaped by them. Her spy life required that she talk about them with scare-quotes. She pretended that she felt something for the men, for Bryce — and she _did_, it was not all pretense — but not what she pretended to feel, nothing fully real.

She laughed internally, remembering Chuck's odd phrase about _Cheez Whiz_: a pasteurized, processed cheese food. Her feelings, even for Bryce — pasteurized, processed emotion-stuff: _Emotionz_, no real emotions, no more than _Cheez Whiz _was real cheese.

Her response to Chuck, small and brief though it was, had been fully real, out of her conscious control, a stirring in the depths of her, a stirring caused by _him. _She did not want to pollute that feeling, distort and stain it, by having to overlay it with falseness, pretense, lies. Nothing would come of it, not even if they lived. But it had happened and she was glad of it and wanted to...treasure the memory of it, not despoil it. But she needed Chuck to tell her about the Intersect. She needed him to tell her for both their sakes, his more than hers…She was prepared to die. She had been prepared for a long time — at first intellectually and then, over the past few years, emotionally. She was no longer sure there was any light at the end of her tunnel - unless it was the Light at the End of the Tunnel, but she had no serious faith in that Light; and if she could even contemplate it, it frightened her. She could not face her own judgment, much less some fabled Last Judgment.

But she was so cold. Her hands were now shaking. She pulled the robe closer around her, knotted the belt. She reached out to Chuck again and gave him a gentle nudge. He grumbled and turned over to face her. She could not see him in the dark but she felt his movement. He jerked and she knew he sat up. She could hear him feeling around himself, gasping.

"What the hell? Where are my clothes? Who put me in a hotel robe — a cheap hotel robe?"

"They did."

"Who are they?"

"I don't know but they did the same to me."

Chuck was silent for a moment. "You mean they took your clothes too? You're...naked — I mean, except for the robe?"

If it were possible for a person's words themselves to blush, Chuck's did, they reddened audibly. Sarah knew this was her moment, the first opening. She should scoot to him, let him feel her shiver - a shiver real enough - and exploit it. Nothing needed to happen, not _that, _anyway, but she could make the image she knew was in his mind become concrete, tactile if not visual. Let him feel her warmth, knowing only a thickness of cheap terry cloth covered it. She could control him, pull and push him, make him hers - she his owner, not his companion.

This was her moment. She started to scoot toward him, _Begin the Beguine_, start the seduction; she stopped halfway. But then Chuck scooted halfway, and they were in terry cloth-to-terry cloth contact.

"I'm freezing. I don't mean to be forward, and I promise to keep both my hands and even...my imagination from roaming. I admit I might be emboldened by the fact that you can't see me, but I won't be. I… um…don't embolden easily — girlish screams, remember?"

Sarah laughed despite all her inner discord. She scooted a little nearer, increasing the pressure of the contact between them, then she moved her bare feet until they were in contact with his.

"Wow. I've heard of feet of clay," Chuck mock-groused, "but I took that to be a metaphor. Are those attached to the rest of you by an actual circulatory system, or are they icy prosthetics?"

Sarah laughed again. "No, it's all me. No prosthetics," - _except maybe my heart_ \- "I'm all real girl."

She felt Chuck move his head as if he had misheard her. She knew what she said was false. She was _all real_ in the sense that she had no prosthetics, but not all real in the sense of normal, genuine, true. She was clay from her feet to the top of her head - an earthenware woman, produced in a CIA kiln, glazed carefully by Langston Graham, impervious to her own life, her own heart.

Chuck was quiet for a minute. Then he stroked her feet with his feet, imitating her hand rubbing his hand earlier.

"Better."

She nodded but was not sure he knew she had. "Much. Cold still but not so painful."

"Why did they take our clothes, Sarah?"

Sarah swallowed. _Begin the Beguin?_

* * *

Sarah did not believe she was all real girl. Chuck's head buzzed. The rest of him was buzzing too.

He could feel her pressed against his side, nothing between them but two layers of terry cloth. Though he had never seen her, he knew what the touch of her hand — and now the touch of her feet — had done and was doing to him. He could now catch a faint trace of her scent, spicy and floral, as if she had not spent however many hours in a dark cell.

Chuck had not been this close to a woman who affected him since Jill Roberts, back at Stanford. Five years of half-voluntary, half-involuntary celibacy. And now a woman he had never seen but had touched hands and feet with was affecting him so much he felt dizzy.

When he woke up the first time, without shoes, he took it to be a deterrent to escape. Perhaps nakedness under terry cloth was too, but it seemed...overkill. _Not the best choice of words. _Why would they undress them — and why would they turn the heat down, freeze them.

Why was Sarah in his cell? Why had he not thought of that question first? She had not answered his clothes-question but Chuck asked another: "Why are you in my cell, or why am I in your cell?"

Sarah was silent for a while longer. "I don't know."

Buzz. Chuck winced. She knew - or at least she knew something. "I get that taking our clothes and shoes might help keep us from escaping or to make an escape...harder. But why put us in one cell when there are two?" Is anyone in the other cell?"

"No, Chuck, I don't think so."

Chuck stood up, disentangling the feet that had somehow entangled as they talked. He walked toward the bars, his hands out, like a kid pretending to be a zombie. His hands contacted the bars. He felt along them until he located the door, then he pulled on it. Locked. He went back and sat down.

"So," Sarah asked, "we're together, I mean locked in here together?"

"So it seems," Chuck answered. "And so why have they put us together?"

* * *

Sarah was tongue-tied as surely as she had been tied to the chair earlier. What answer could she give? _Wait, my bug-detector! _She put her hand to her hair - but the comb concealing the detector was missing. She should have noticed that immediately. But she had not been herself, not quite herself, since she woke up in her cell the first time. Chuck was making it worse — the not-being-herself.

He said she was undoubtedly more herself when they woke but was that true? She had been addled by the effects of the drug — and then he had addled...distracted her, Chuck had. She kept forgetting where they were and what was going on, kept getting lost in talking to him.

But they — whoever they were — could listen now and she would not know. And earlier — had it been a coincidence that they tranqed her and Chuck just after they made contact, touched each other? Had they waited to see — was there some kind of two-way mirror or visual surveillance that they were using, something her detector would not have detected?

Was someone watching, maybe listening, now? She dropped her hand from her hair and felt something in her pocket. It was small, round. She fished it out, closing her hand around it. She peeked. It was a plastic timer, and it read: 23:01. She had already lost an hour: a countdown to Chuck's death and hers. She put it back in the pocket of her robe.

Sarah finally answered. "Perhaps it is an experiment? To see how what Bryce sent you affects you."

Chuck did not immediately respond. "Maybe so. But we were talking before, clothed and in separate cells…"

Sarah needed to keep Chuck focused on something else. If he saw the obvious point — and it was a tribute to his purity of heart that he did not yet see it — he might shut down, refuse to tell her anything. She was not sure why he was reticent. If their captors were right, and if only the visual triggered the Intersect, maybe he did not fully understand what had happened to him. But then why keep Chuck in the dark? It made no sense.

_This will be contained here. _That was what the metallic voice said. That made the situation sound more like quarantine than kidnapping. What did it mean?

"Sarah...Sarah?" Chuck was saying her name. She focused on him again.

"Yes, we were talking before, in separate cells. But maybe they thought we would be less afraid, less inclined to panic if we were together. Maybe feelings like that interfere with whatever Bryce sent you?" Sarah took Chuck's hand. "I know that being closer to you makes me feel better."

* * *

No buzz. True. Chuck had to admit, despite the distraction of knowing Sarah was near him in nothing but a robe, despite the effect of that on him, the overall effect of her near him did make him calm. She had a strange effect on him. When she talked to him, he forgot everything but her, the sound of her voice, what she was saying.

Her hand on his was a paradoxical source of excitement and calm. He squeezed her hand.

"I like you, Chuck," she said after a moment's hesitation.

Chuck smiled in the dark. "I like you too, Sarah." He paused. "Sarah _what_? What is your last name, Sarah?"

"Walker, Sarah Walker."

Chuck's eyes slammed shut. Images filled his mind. Documents. Photographs. Video. A beautiful blonde in a dizzying array of disguises. Wigs. Dresses. Uniforms. Sunglasses. Glasses. Dressed up and dressed down. But weapons, always weapons, the other constant, other than the woman herself. And death, always death. Documented death. Photographed death. Video of death. Knives, guns, poison...her bare hands.

The hand holding his own hand. Chuck yanked his hand back as if hers were a cobra.

He had been holding the bare hand of a killer, an assassin. A CIA killer. Holding her hand, feeling things for her.

He was not just in the dark. He was not just in the labyrinthine dark. He was with the Minotaur.

Except it did not have the head of a bull, it had a head of blonde. Not that he could see it, her blonde head, but whatever was in his head had shown it to him.

He was sitting beside it, the Minotaur; he had been holding its bare hand.

Its bare, dirty, bloodied hand, touching its cold feet. _Cold feet, warm heart: _but that was true of humans, not monsters.

_Cold feet, no heart. _

Chuck scrambled up, his robe flying open, and he ran until he bumped into a wall of the cell, scraping the palms of his hands. He turned, panting, confused, terrified. He could hear Sarah get up, stalk toward him.

"Chuck, Chuck, what's wrong?"

* * *

A/N: Thoughts?


	4. Unit Four: Plight

Chuck Bartowski downloads the Intersect and becomes a prisoner in the same night. Who has taken him and why? Is the stranger in the facing cell a friend or a foe?

* * *

**Labyrinth**

* * *

Unit Four: Plight

* * *

_PLIGHT,_ verb transitive plite. [Latin _plico_; _flecto_, to bend; _ligo_. See Alloy and Ply.]

1\. To pledge; to give as security for the performance of some act; but never applied to property or goods. We say, he plighted his hand, his faith, his vows, his honor, his truth or troth. Pledge is applied to the property as well as to the word, faith, truth, honor, etc. To plight faith is, as it were, to deposit it in pledge for the performance of an act, on the non-performance of which, the pledge is forfeited.

2\. To weave; to braid.

[This is the primary sense of the word, Latin _plico_, but now obsolete.]

_PLIGHT_, noun plite. Literally, a state of being involved, [Latin _plicatus_, _implicatus_, _implicitus;_] hence, perplexity, distress, or a distressed state or condition; as a miserable plight.

* * *

Sarah waited for an answer, her own heart pounding.

Everything had been fine - well, except for being prisoners in the dark under a death sentence and the need for her to get Chuck to confide in her and - and she made herself stop. He ran from her as if she were monstrous.

She could hear him breathing, frightened. She knew the sound: her mind jumped back to a day in the not-so-distant past, a day when she had cornered a CIA target for assassination. The man had been gasping for breath, doubled-over, his hands on his knees, and she could see his breath in the cold Moscow air. Sarah had the man trapped, exhausted; he knew it was over. His gasping was the animal in him, grasping at life. He looked up at her and she lowered her pistol.

She saw the existential terror in his eyes, saw the saliva running from the corner of his mouth, saw his bobbing Adam's apple, saw his bloodied right hand, mangled from a shot of hers that disarmed him.

She saw it all - a man, an evil man, a killer and worse. But, still, a man. She shut herself down as she always did before pulling the death-trigger, slowing her breathing and alienating her conscience. She squeezed the trigger - and _click_. She had somehow lost count of her shots in the firefight with the man, in her hurry to catch up with him.

She saw hope flicker in his eyes with the click. Perhaps he thought it was a sign, an omen of oncoming mercy. Before he could move, Sarah tossed the gun aside, onto a bag of trash, and, she leaped forward, putting her hands around the man's throat. Her hands were twin pythons - he struggled but he was too weak and too frightened for the struggle to have an effect - and she squeezed the life out of him, watching his eyes go from human-alive to fish-dead as she robbed him of breath. He went limp; the air filled with the odor of urine. She was standing in it as it puddled.

She unsqueezed her hands and his body slumped onto the wet, steaming, dirty pavement. Standing over him for a moment, she gazed at her hands. Somewhere inside her, far away, she heard a cry, but she ignored it and its echo and she walked to the trash bag and reclaimed her gun.

She had claimed another victim. Graham would be happy. She would be numb, more numb, hard and harder, as she was each passing day, enduring her ongoing moral fossilization. She was becoming less than human and had been since the fateful day Graham conscripted her into the Company…

"Stay back," Chuck hissed as she took another step toward him. "Oh, my God, just stay back. Or, if you are here to kill me, just do it and do it quickly."

Dread filled Sarah. "Kill you? Chuck, I'm with you….I mean I'm on your side." She stopped walking.

* * *

Chuck was too panicked to notice that his head did not buzz. He realized his robe had fallen open and he grabbed the front of it, holding it closed in a tight fist.

"On my side? Good Lord, you are not on anyone's side - unless it is Death's."

* * *

Sarah gasped involuntarily, and the dread that filled her filled her to bursting. "Death's?" She asked the question in a wounded whisper.

* * *

The sound of the wound reached past Chuck's panic. Still holding his robe closed, he took a deeper, slower breath, trying to still his mind, shove aside the visions he had just experienced. "You are not just a spy, Sarah Walker, you are an assassin. A good one - in the relative sense, meaning good-at-killing. You can't be a good assassin in any other sense: that would be a contradiction in terms. A good assassin is a bad human being."

* * *

"How?" Sarah felt her eyes sting with hot tears. "How could you…?"

And then it washed over her. Chuck's reactions, hesitancies. The Intersect was doing something to him. _It told him about me._

Sarah had faced no one who knew the whole CIA truth about her but had no share in it. Graham knew but he was part of that truth, the cause of much that was true of her. But now she stood, stripped bare somehow, in front of a good man - not just relatively good, a good man, a good human being, of that much she was already sure - and he knew the whole CIA truth about her, the grisly, subhuman detail of it all, the shameful, disturbing reality.

_Shame_.

Sarah knew - during and in the immediate, miserable aftermath of her Red Test, her first assassination - that the fact of the target's deserving his - or her - fate did not make the hands that dispensed that fate clean hands. Execution, vengeance, - it all dehumanized, regardless of the purported justice served. _Dirty hands._ To believe it did not was to live in a fairyland in which a person could dispense violence without violating herself in return. To believe it did not was to live in ignorance of human nature. Only someone disturbed could kill without remorse. Especially as she had killed - so often in cold blood and with careful premeditation. Rifles recoiled - so did all violence. Death was hard to deliver and delivering it exacted a hardness that could not be sloughed off at will.

Sarah had become Death's delivery girl…She _was_ on Death's side...or she had been...

"How _could _you?"

Chuck answered her question with a question, and she heard him sliding slowly along the wall, trying to increase the distance between them.

She tried to close it with words. "Chuck, I...I am a spy, not a corporate spy, a CIA Agent. I've been one for a long time. I...I've done things..."

Chuck continued to slide although there was nowhere in the cell he could hide from her.

"What do you know, Chuck," Sarah asked, knowing the answer but impelled by the pressure of her dread, "and how do you know?"

The sliding stopped. "I don't know _how_ I know, not exactly - but I know a lot." He went on for a few seconds, reciting information from her CIA recruitment paperwork, each detail correct. She heard it all as a dark litany, her baptismal certificate, baptism into death. Langston Graham had known she was lost, alone even when with her father, yet somehow more alone without him. Graham had known and he had used his knowledge. She had given Graham her tiller; he became her ferryman.

Until Budapest, when something - or someone - inside her broke free.

"First mission," Chuck was going on, his voice almost automated, mechanical, disturbingly like the metallic voice that had given Sarah her activation code, "Leipzig…"

"Okay, Chuck, okay...You know. You know what I am."

"A monster," Chuck said, without attempting to vilify her or insult her. He described it as a plain fact, as he had her height when he recited the information on her recruitment paperwork. Hearing it said that way was far worse than if he had said it intending to hurt her.

"Oh, God!" Sarah sank to her knees, then bent at her waist and fell to her hands.

She began to cry, the sobs small at first, burbling from her, and then the truth of what Chuck said pierced her through, her plight of mind and soul, a decade long, revealed itself to her, and she wept. And she wept.

And at some moment in her weeping, she felt Chuck kneel beside her and put his arms around her. He began to sob too. Crying for her, crying with her. It was the most marvelous moment of her life, sunlit in the deepest darkness, despite her thorough misery. It was a comfort when justice had put her beyond comfort.

She sat up, her weight on her heels, and she turned at the waist. Chuck took her in his arms, and she took him in hers. But as she did, she felt him stiffen - she felt his fear. That he feared her made the moment worse and better.

"I will not hurt you, Chuck," she whispered in his ear. "You can trust me."

* * *

No buzz after her words - Chuck knew she was telling the truth.

He knelt there, a killer in his arms, afraid of her, unsure what to do, but unable to refuse the need expressed in her sobs, a need too deep for words but, for him, demanding an answer.

Sarah was so alone she did not even have herself for company.

She moved her arms up, around his neck, and he had a sudden image of a corpse in Moscow, its neck swollen and purple. He jerked and she clung tighter to him, like a child, weeping into the crook of his neck. He forced himself to be calm - calmer, and he rubbed her back, murmuring to her, not even sure of the words he was saying.

She was the labyrinth. He knew that now. They were in one together, but she was lost in a labyrinth inside the labyrinth.

When her sobs slowed, Chuck pulled back a little. He could not see her but he could feel her breath on him. "I've...seen...it all, Sarah. I don't...I don't know what to make of it…"

"I try not to think about it," she whispered to him, "and mostly, I succeed, but that doesn't mean I don't know it all, carry it all with me, every single deed…It takes so much energy not to know what I know about myself."

Chuck knew something about self-deception. He worked at it too, every day when he clocked in at the Buy More or tried to ignore Ellie's lectures about his failure to launch. He worked hard not to know what he knew about himself - that he was miserable, a failure in his own eyes, a profound self-disappointment.

His inner labyrinth was not as...dark...as Sarah's, but it was no less real. Bryce's betrayal, Jill's betrayal, it had driven him to hide from himself: he had never faced what happened, his shattered hopes, and it had, as a result, distanced him from his hopes. It had not made him stop hoping but it had made him afraid to acknowledge those hopes. And to fear to acknowledge that you hoped was to be functionally hopeless. Worse, it was to be hopeless amid hopes - a formula for quiet desperation.

_Where there's life, there's hope. _

He was alive. Sarah was alive. He needed to fight. He wanted out of the dark. Sarah had the skill set to deliver him and herself if anyone did.

He felt her lift her head and he felt her lips on his. An act of thanksgiving. The contact was tentative, checked. She expected him to pull back. But he responded. A part of him fought it but that part lost. He kissed her back. The kiss was brief, light but it was more electric than the touching of their hands or feet. He found her absolutely compelling - beyond anything he could understand, compelling at a depth he did not know he had.

He pushed her away softly. "Sarah, I can't. I…"

"You can't kiss a monster. I understand. But I thank you, Chuck, for holding me."

He reached out and found her face, stroked her wet cheek. "No, Sarah, it's not that…"

"Yes, it is, Chuck. I don't know how you found the courage to hold me. Knowing what I am. Thank you."

There was no self-pity in her voice, no hint of rancor, just bare pain.

"Sarah, …"

The feeling of her in his arms, the warmth of her spreading to him, made him stop. Made him think.

"Wait, Sarah, they took our clothes, put us in these robes, to force us together...They want us to…"

He heard Sarah inhale. "No, Chuck, that's not it."

Buzz.

* * *

Sarah recoiled from her words.

She lied. She was so used to lying. She needed Chuck to tell her more and if he knew they - whoever they were - had plotted for this, he would pull back and retreat. They did not have much time. She would have to reveal that they had activated her, given her orders, taken her from the cell. He would think she was on the other side, even if she wasn't on Death's side.

_I'm on your side, Chuck. But I need to keep you in the dark for a while longer, until I understand our plight, can see a way out…I need to keep my...our...options open..._

Chuck stood. Sarah reached out to him in the dark but he walked away, crossed to the bars. She heard him pull on them.

* * *

Chuck's mind was spinning.

Sarah had told him to trust her. She had told him the truth when she told him that. It was not a lying promise, a false pledge. But then she lied to him about their situation. He knew he was right: they wanted her to...seduce him, control him.

Why would she lie about that?

How could he trust her when he could not believe her?

* * *

A/N: If you'd like more of this, please respond. Coming chapters will lengthen now that the basic structure is in place.


	5. Unit Five: Liar

Chuck Bartowski downloads the Intersect and becomes a prisoner in the same night. Who has taken him and why? Is the stranger in the facing cell a friend or a foe?

* * *

**Labyrinth**

* * *

Unit Five: Liar

* * *

LIE, noun  
1\. A criminal falsehood; a falsehood uttered for the purpose of deception; an intentional violation  
of truth. Fiction, or a false statement or representation, not intended to deceive, mislead or injure, as in fables, parables and the like, is not a lie.  
It is willful deceit that makes a lie. A man may act a lie as by pointing his finger in a wrong direction, when a traveler inquires of him his road.  
2\. A fiction; in a ludicrous sense.  
3\. False doctrine.  
4\. An idolatrous picture of God, or a false god.  
5\. That which deceives and disappoints confidence.  
To give the lie to charge with falsehood. A man's actions may give the lie to his words.

LIE, verb intransitive  
1\. To utter falsehood with an intention to deceive, or with an immoral design.  
2\. To exhibit a false representation; to say or do that which deceives another, when he has a right to know the truth, or when morality requires a just representation.

* * *

Sarah missed Chuck's embrace, longed for it, though it had been hers so briefly. She could feel the distance between them — not much distance physically, the cell they shared was too small — but an emotional distance had opened up again when she had lied to him about their captors.

He must have inferred she was lying - the evidence the captors' intentions was clear enough and she had denied it. She needed to keep him talking to her, emotionally near her, physically too. Her robe was proving to be almost no source of warmth, particularly now that she had the memory of being held in Chuck's arms. That was warm; in his arms, she had come in from the cold. She wished she could see him.

She had not thought he was slow-witted, but she had not given him credit for being as clever in the situation as he was proving to be. Even afraid — of their imprisonment, their captors, of her — he kept managing to hold himself together, or to pull himself back together quickly. His mind was quicksilver, as quicksilver as his words, and that should have been no surprise, since the latter expressed the former.

If she was going to get him to tell her about the Intersect, more about what it was doing, since it had obviously supplied her history to him, she needed to get him to trust her. But it was not just that she wanted to save the two of them. She did not enjoy lying to him, not at all. The words backwashed into her mouth, bile. She had lied all her life — almost all of it that she could remember, and had been taught that lying was _right_: a weapon in the never-ending battle of all against all, the zero-sum game of earthbound human happiness. Her dad had been the prince of this world, the father of her lies. Deceit had been her first meat after graduating from her mother's milk. She had conned with her father for years before she realized he was lying to her about lying.

He knew as well as anyone that truthfulness was right - that human life was barely imaginable if it were nothing but a succession of lies: a chorus of boys and girls crying wolf, each eventually eaten in isolation. But that had not stopped her. She lied out of love of her father for years after she knew it was still wrong, splitting herself in two and trying to live in the resulting gap.

And then she graduated from her father's tutelage to Langston Graham's, and lying was justified as a means to ends she did not understand and mostly too vast to picture, but that Graham assured were The Greater Good. At that point, her split halves shattered, and she became a jigsaw, a puzzle to herself, unsolvable, pieces missing.

Budapest and her choices there had given Sarah her first look at the picture atop her puzzle box, an image of herself she had never had before, restored pieces that had been missing forever. And when she touched Chuck, hands, feet, when she held him, kissed him, all her pieces developed minds of their own, and they moved by an occult force toward each other, toward integration, solution. It was crazy — she had never seen his face and he had seen her history, but it was...how she felt. About a man. A man in the dark. A man in the dark with his head full of her secrets. She knew how she felt — instead of _unknowing_ it. But how much could it matter? He was across the cell from her, pulling on the bars. He was a creature of sunlight, she was a cave-dweller.

"Sarah, why do you think we are naked - practically naked, anyway, in this bone-chilling cold?"

She approached the truth on cat's feet. "I think...they're trying to get us to trust each other, break down...our defenses."

Chuck was very silent, as if he was hanging on her words, except the silence extended past them, as if he were mulling them over, reconsidering them, weighing them.

"Okay, let's say that's right - as far as it goes. Why would they need _you_ to trust _me_? Why would this be a two-way street? How could having you trust me serve any purpose of theirs?'

"I'm not sure, Chuck, but we are both in the same boat, the same robes and the same cell. They went to the trouble of tranqing us both to bring it about, so it must matter."

"But, how do I know you are in this in the same way I am? I'm ignorant. I do not understand what they want, although it seems likely that it's whatever cranium surprise Bryce emailed me."

He stopped talking and for a second Sarah had an irrational fear that the darkness had swallowed him whole, one fatal gulp. But then he went on.

"You seem to know something about it, even though you've admitted your corporate spy routine was a lie — so what is this binary earworm that Bryce dropped into me? Does it have a name, some cool code word that ends in 'x', like 'Computex'? Or maybe 'Brain-x'?"

Sarah fought an urge to giggle, not so much at the silly names but at Chuck's willingness to discuss them. "No," she said, keeping her voice serious, "it's called the Intersect."

Again, she felt that he was weighing her words, scrutinizing them. She felt herself sink again, her momentary desire to giggle swamped by the memory of what had just occurred between them.

"Chuck, I realize it must be hard, trusting me, after learning what you have learned. I have to face it, face it at last, what I am. I've tried to keep from facing it, to keep it behind me, living in a gap between the past and the present." She swallowed, tears threatening again. "I suppose we all do, but...normal people live in that gap along with traces of their past and anticipations of their future, good things they hope for..."

She heard Chuck move toward her — the right direction at least. "What do you mean, Sarah?" His voice was so gentle it almost broke her.

_How can he do it, be gentle to me, when I am so hard? His knowledge of me is an aisle of terrors, horrors, so how can he treat me like a person, a woman, when I can't treat myself that way? He described me as a monster but he hasn't treated me like one, except in his initial panic. He held me._

"What do you mean, Sarah?"

It was Sarah's turn to weigh her words. She had never been a talker. A thinker - or maybe better, a plotter: thinking led to second thoughts, to attacks of conscience. Talking was always self-revelation. But she felt a desire to speak. Maybe it was the dark; maybe it was that Chuck knew the things, most of them anyway, she tried to keep hidden; maybe it was just Chuck, the feeling she had around him, before the Intersect told him her secrets, of not _having_ secrets, of just _being_, _being with him_, even in the dark, in barred cells.

Her earlier lapses had not been the after-effects of tranqs; they had been the effects of him.

So she spoke. "I'm not sure. For...obvious reasons, I avoided traces of my past, and I had nothing to expect, not in the sense of good things. I had goals, mission goals, but those were...what did you say earlier?..._relative_ goods...I surrendered _absolute_ goods, gave up on happiness. I figured that was my punishment. I could...stay ahead of my past if I...forfeited my future…It seemed...fair" She stopped talking.

"Why do you do it? Your job?"

"It's a long story…"

"We have time..."

_No, Chuck, we don't. Not like you think. _She put her hand in her robe pocket, felt the small timer there.

He went on. "...We're not going anywhere." He waited but Sarah did not know where to begin. How could she tell him about her family, her dad, her early misdeeds?

She wanted to tell him, though, felt the words coming again, but he spoke first, filling the gap in the conversation.

"So, the Intersect. Are you sure there's no 'x'? It could be the Intersex. —Oh, wait, no, I don't want anyone knowing I have the Intersex in my head. It sounds too much like I downloaded Irene Demova."

"Demova?…Oh, the Irene you mentioned. The flexible woman your friend is fixated on, firmly."

"Say, you have a good memory."

"It's saved my life a number of times. But I have forgotten things occasionally," — _like the number of shots I fired in a firefight in Moscow_ —"and it has caused me problems."

"You know about me, knew about me?"

"Yes, Chuck, I was told about you by my boss, Langston Graham. CIA director. He called me, told me about you, a little about you. There was supposed to be a file on the plane. But he called you 'Charles', not 'Chuck'. I didn't put it together as quickly as I should have…"

Chuck laughed quickly, quietly. "No surprise. Tranqs, dark, cold...easy to fail to put things together."

_No, it's you, Chuck. It just took me a while to put that together too._

"Did you know that I knew Bryce?"

"No, not exactly. I knew he sent the Intersect to you and so I assumed there was a connection, but I didn't prejudge what it was."

"You mean you didn't decide if I was in on it with Bryce, knew he was sending the Intersect to me?"

Sarah shrugged even though Chuck could not see it. "Yes, I didn't think you sounded like a spy or an accomplice. But I couldn't be sure."

"Good of you to give me the benefit of the doubt."

"I think you've returned the favor, Chuck."

"Huh?"

"You're still talking to me, not screaming for them — whoever they are — to let you out of the monster's cell."

Chuck cleared his throat and moved closer to her still. "About that. I'm sorry. I spoke without thinking. Bad habit. Logorrhea."

"No," Sarah responded, softly but sternly. "Don't be sorry. I needed to hear that - and I couldn't have heard it from anyone I...know."

"Someone like Bryce?"

Sarah blushed in the dark.

"You were his _partner_, right?"

Chuck's inflection clarified his meaning; he was imputing a more-than-professional relationship.

"Why would you think that, Chuck?"

"Because he always got all the great girls. I watched them parade by at Stanford, tall and short, dark and light, blonde and brunette, all afloat with Bryce in their eyes."

"Was there a...float in the parade that you were interested in, Chuck."

He was quiet and he had stopped moving toward her. He cleared his throat again. "The last one — at the Stanford parade. She had been my girl — Jill Roberts — and I was...making plans. For after, you know, after graduation. I'd even gone to a jeweler's and looked at rings. I didn't have the money but I put one on layaway. I suppose it is still there, along with my deposit. I could never get myself to get my money back."

"Is that why you didn't graduate?" She softened her voice. "A broken heart?"

"Yes and No. It was...complicated."

Sarah huffed loudly.

"What, Sarah?"

"That's my line."

"And you haven't answered my question about Bryce — your partner?"

"Your friend?"

"Not really, Sarah, not for a long time."

"Well, he's not my...partner anymore, not for a long time. Not as long as you, but long enough. And I don't know that I was ever anything but his _partner_ \- as you used the term. We were...together...but never really together."

Chuck made a low humming sound. "But you knew that even when you were together - you knew that you were not really together?"

"I suppose so, Chuck, I knew it and I…"

"Didn't know it."

"Yes."

"I did the same - with Jill. I...I knew that she had fallen for Bryce, but was hanging on with me, because she liked me, _liked_ me, but I wouldn't let myself acknowledge it. I just kept hoping she would choose me after all...But then everything fell apart. They charged me with cheating. Bryce was the source of the charges...and I...well, long story short...I got expelled...Jill eventually went to Bryce. I found out after I left. I might as well have been expelled from my life — because I left it too, checked out of it and clocked in at the Buy More. I make eleven dollars an hour to hide from the world, from myself, from the future I left on layaway in Palo Alto."

They were both quiet for a moment, reflecting.

Chuck broke the silence: "So our sad stories have Intersected?"

* * *

Chuck heard Sarah chuckle ruefully. "That's one way to put it."

Sarah had been telling him the truth. She _had been_ with Bryce and it _was_ over. It was odd - given all that Chuck had just come to know about her, that that was the image he could not get out of his head, and it was not the gift of the Intersect but of his envious imagination: an animated image of Bryce and Sarah together, dressed in black, sharing a steamy kiss before spy-fighting a horde of bad guy foes, only to win easily, and share another steamy kiss.

Maybe it was because five years had passed; maybe there was another reason; still, just then, that image of Bryce and Sarah tormented Chuck more deeply than the image of Bryce and Jill making love that had been replaying in his mind during idle moments, replaying for years.

But, tormenting though the image of Bryce and Sarah was, knowing that she was telling him the truth about them made it bearable. The image, Saturday-morning-cartoonish, like a deleted scene from a Johnny Quest episode, represented Sarah's past, if it represented anything at all. At present, she was in a dark cell with Chuck. And he could still taste her lips faintly on his own, feel her in his arms.

He had been moving toward her, drawn to her, as they talked. The pain he had heard in her sobs, her voice, was still there, but she seemed calmer now, almost...relieved.

He had calmed too. Each time he touched her he felt...changed. Empowered. And although he knew the woman he touched was the woman in his...flash..._yes, that's what I'll call them_...he had a hard time holding them together.

But he made himself stop moving toward her. If he touched her again he...well, he was all too aware of her nakedness beneath her robe, the feeling of her supple and soft against him. He shivered — in response to both the cold and to the warm, warming memory.

"So what's the Intersect supposed to do? Augmentation?"

Sarah sighed audibly in the dark. He heard her shiver in the sigh. "We know little about it. Rumors and chatter. A rogue spy organization — rooted in the CIA itself — has it. They are supposed to have stolen it from an inventor, CIA code name Orion, someone who dropped out of sight years ago and has not been seen again."

"So the CIA wants to destroy it?"

"I don't know. Perhaps. But I know Graham wants it — as does Beckman, the woman who runs the NSA."

"But why?"

"It is supposed to create superspies - the augmentation is all designed to make a spy more formidable."

"How?"

"I don't know."

No buzzing. She was still telling him the truth.

* * *

Sarah had an opening. She could get Chuck to talk about the Intersect now.

"I'm hoping you can tell me, Chuck. Obviously, the Intersect gave you access to data, top-secret data. I assume my name triggered you?"

_If they were listening, they have to know they are wrong about the triggers being solely visual. Or did they even believe that? Maybe they have us in the dark for another reason? But why tell me that?_

* * *

"Yes, you said your full name and my head...filled. I flashed."

"It that what you are calling it?"

"Seems apt."

"What did you...see...during the flash?"

"You...in disguises...in foreign cities...paperwork, photographs, video…"

"Has anything else happened...any other flash or weird experience?"

Chuck wanted to tell her the truth, but he was the odd man out in this whole bizarre situation. He had no skills, no weapons. He had no plan, but he was reluctant to give up the lie-detecting secret. It was his only advantage, the one ace in his hand. And, although Sarah had not done so again, she had lied to him. She knew more about their plight than she had shared.

Bracing for the mental shock, Chuck answered. "No." _Buzzzzz. _He squeezed his eyes shut against the pain.

"Okay, Chuck, but tell me if anything else happens. I need to know."

Chuck didn't answer, sparing himself the pain of a false pledge. He heard Sarah shiver again. She had been sitting on the cold floor all this time. Chuck let himself complete the distance to her. He knelt beside her and reached out. His hand found hers and he felt a pleasant shock, a contrast with the one he had just felt in his head.

"You're cold."

"I'm freezing. Numb all over."

"C'mon." Chuck led her toward the wall where he expected to find a narrow cot, attached to the wall. But he slammed his shin into something.

"Ouch!"

"What is it, Chuck?"

"Ran into something." He let go of Sarah's hand. There was a bed, a double bed, in the cell. Its opposite side was against the wall.

"Chuck?"

"It's a bed, a double bed. I guess we've graduated from two beds to one."

"Graduated?"

"So, we're back the repetition thing? Okay, perhaps not the best word. Anyway, why don't you take the bed? Get off the cold floor. I can give you my robe."

"No, you can't. You'll freeze. The floor is like the ice in a skating rink. Get in bed with me."

A moment of silence in which Chuck blushed and he could swear he heard Sarah blush, if blushes were audible.

"Okay." Chuck decided not to spiral. He could do that once he was in the bed, do it quietly in his own head.

Sarah climbed onto the bed and Chuck followed her. After situating themselves, they were both on their backs, staring up into the darkness.

Sarah's hand found Chuck's.

"Chuck?"

"Yeah?"

* * *

Sarah felt the words coming again.

"Can I tell you...more about me? Do you think you could stand to know? It will not make it better." One of her hands squeezed his. In her other hand, she held the timer. She would make time for this.

* * *

"I trust you, Chuck."

Chuck felt her gather herself as she paused, tighten her grip on his hand. "All my life, Chuck, since I was a little girl, I've been a liar."

No buzz.


	6. Unit Six: Confession

Chuck Bartowski downloads the Intersect and becomes a prisoner in the same night. Who has taken him and why? Is the stranger in the facing cell a friend or a foe?

* * *

**Labyrinth**

* * *

Unit Six: Confession

* * *

CONFES'SION, noun

1\. The acknowledgment of a crime, fault or something to one's disadvantage; open declaration of guilt, failure, debt, accusation, etc.  
2\. Avowal; the act of acknowledging; profession.  
3\. The act of disclosing sins or faults to a priest; the disburdening of the conscience privately to a confessor; sometimes called auricular confession  
4\. A formulary in which the articles of faith are comprised; a creed to be assented to or signed, as a preliminary to admission into a church.  
5\. The acknowledgment of a debt by a debtor before a justice of the peace, etc., on which judgment is entered and execution issued.

* * *

Sarah said the word 'liar' and she stopped.

Could she tell Chuck this? Even Langston Graham only knew bits and pieces of the story. He knew generalities, but not particulars, not the beginnings of the story of her con artist days. Who knew if they — the metallic voice and anyone else who might be a confederate — were listening? Could she risk the story if they might overhear it. She wanted to tell Chuck it; she really did. And that desire was so new in kind that it made her feel...giddy...despite everything.

_Confession is good for the soul. I remember hearing that. But who knew I had a soul still? I thought I had bargained it away little by little, with every con, then every termination mission. _

Chuck had said nothing but he was making the low, humming noise he made earlier. Sarah realized he was humming _a tune_, not just making a sound.

"Chuck, what's that song?"

"What song?"

She rolled over on her side to face him, although it did not help her see him in the thick darkness. "The one you are humming. You hummed it before, when you asked me about Bryce, but I didn't recognize it as a melody."

Chuck was quiet for a few seconds, then the humming began again, this time deliberately, loud enough for Sarah to make it out, although she did not recognize it.

Chuck stopped humming. "I wasn't doing it consciously. I guess the song has been playing in the back of my head since I first woke up…"

"What is it?"

"It's a song by the La's, off their only album. The song's called _Way Out._"

"You mean like - _way out there? Oddball?_"

"No, like _an escape._"

Chuck began to sing softly, but tunefully.

Give me one last kiss  
Before I walk out of this  
Give me some money  
'Cause I'm right in a hurry  
To get away out of his  
But I'm telling you this  
That I don't aim to miss  
To get a way out of this…"

He stopped and cleared his throat, obviously self-conscious. "I guess I was humming the melody of that first couple of lines. I prefer the Andy MacDonald version."

"Version?"

"Lee Mavers, the lead guy in the band, couldn't ever seem to get the songs to come out of production sounding like they did in his head, so he recorded and re-recorded them with different producers. MacDonald's version is open, chimey. The whole song sounds a lot like XTC's _Yacht Dance_ \- but I forget which came first. Probably the XTC. No, almost certainly the XTC. Although I'm not accusing the La's of ripping XTC off or anything. The guitar parts are just similar."

"Did you _flash_? Does the Intersect have some kind of pop music module?"

Chuck laughed quietly, but enough to make the bed move. "No, that's all me, not that I am proud of all the time I have misspent in headphones or with a guitar in my hands."

"You play?"

"Yes. If we ever get out of here, maybe I can play for you."

Sarah felt a rush of heated excitement, an interior _Oh, yes, please. _But then she forced the rush back down. Nothing would come of these conversations, of these hand-holdings in the dark. Even if they escaped, they would part company. In the light, she would never be his choice, no matter how lovingkind he was in the dark, no matter what happened between them in this cage. Freedom would change things, even if the light did not.

'_Lovingkind'? Now I am talking like him. Thinking like him, anyway - _the rush of heat returned - _a little, anyway. And I am asking myself questions that repeat my own words. _

Her mind turned over the song lyrics.

They were lyrics about escape - she could well understand how they might come to mind for Chuck. Unfortunately, her mind was unequipped with popular culture. She knew a lot about knives - but it was hard to work any of that into polite conversation. Not that she and Chuck were having polite conversation…

She shook her head softly, trying to slow the train of thought before it derailed. The lyrics. They weren't just about escape…

"I'd like that. I know little about music but I like it. I love to dance. And, say, Chuck, those lyrics - were you thinking about my kiss?" She couldn't keep a flirty tone from her voice.

Chuck laughed again, nervously. "Um...Maybe I shouldn't answer that."

"Chuck, tell me." Sarah drew his name out, lingering on the 'u' sound; she couldn't stop it any more than she could rid her words of the flirty tone.

"Yes, I guess I was. The chorus goes:

Give it all you got now  
Give it all you got now - Yeah give a little  
Give it all you got now  
Give it all you got now - Yeah give a little

But maybe I should have kept that to myself too? I'm not entirely sure the chorus is about the kiss…"

Sarah rolled on top of Chuck and kissed him for all she was worth.

Not just a kiss of thanksgiving, although thanksgiving was present. It was a kiss of introduction - as all of Sarah met all of Chuck. He was submissive beneath her for a moment, surprised, but then his hands were on her back, pulling her into him. The kiss was not premeditated, and during the small succession of eternities it lasted, Sarah's head went empty, while her heart filled to bursting. She had never responded to a kiss as she did to that kiss. She gave it all she had, all the secrets and shame and all the unlovely, unlovable parts of her were in it, as well as all her best, whatever of that remained to be shared.

The kiss was heated; Sarah knew how heated she was and the open front of Chuck's robe provided her with access to solid evidence of how heated he was. She almost let herself be pulled under by the kiss a third time — but she put her palms on the mattress and lifted part of her weight from him. She looked down on him unseeingly. She smiled.

Chuck sighed dizzily. "If that wasn't you giving it all you've got, don't tell me. I don't think I could live through that kiss, and this one may claim me yet, _a posteriori_."

"Chuck, did you just mention my bottom?"

She heard Chuck choke. She laughed and leaned down and kissed him again, caution thrown into the wind like confetti at a ticker-tape parade.

"Actually, Chuck, I am an expert on languages, and although I only once used Latin to converse, I know the language."

"You talked to someone in Latin, like, real, _non-porcine_ Latin?"

She was enjoying the feeling of him, all of him, beneath her, although her heat was not making her impatient. She was enjoying the closeness, the intimacy of the moment, the way they seemed unable to be or remain strangers to each other.

"Yes, I was on a mission in eastern Europe and needed help finding a famous painting the CIA believed held a clue about a cipher. I went to a monastery where the painting once hung and ended up talking in Latin to an ancient monk. We shared no other language. He told me where the painting was - some petty local tyrant had taken it - and I stole it back, found the clue, and returned it to the monastery, the monk."

"Wow. Your stories are so much _better_ than mine."

Chuck's sentence was a dousing of cold water. She had started a story and let herself get distracted. It was not fair to Chuck to keep kissing him when he did not understand her lips were liar's lips. She had said so — but she owed him the explanation.

She rolled off him, heard him take a deep breath and felt him close his robe. Hers had remained closed and the belt knotted.

"My stories aren't all better, Chuck. I have stories that are much worse than anything you could tell on yourself, I'm sure. As I said, I am a liar - from almost my earliest memories."

She felt Chuck take her hand. She spoke. She wanted him to know her, even if the cost was that they might come to know something about her too. She kept her voice low, so that Chuck could hear it but it would not carry.

"My dad and mom never fit as a couple. He was crooked. She was straight. Straight but brittle, like an icicle. He broke her. He was a thief, but he hid that from himself by telling himself he was an artist, a con artist. He was full of the rules of his art: "A good con never has to leave town…"

She stopped, the memory of the words and the Christmas swindle he had been referring to made her too deeply ashamed to speak. After a moment, she went on, enduring her shame.

"He took me from my mom — although maybe 'took' is not the right word. I chose him, if a child can genuinely choose. He was full of life and fun, or what I took to be fun — days spent with him seemed like...adventures. Days spent with my mom were...not adventures. They were drudgery. I suppose, looking back now, she was depressed — about dad, about her inability to change him or to quit him. She was as much a victim of his charm as anyone, more than anyone — except maybe me. He charmed his own daughter: charmed her out of her childhood."

She took a moment, trying to organize her thoughts. She trusted him — crazy, but true. She did not need to try to put it all perfectly. She let loose of her internal editor and she just spoke, spoke from the heart she did not know she still had until she Budapest. But even then, she had not known the heart was...romantic, capable of romance, of _Sturm und Drang. _But she was _Sturming und Dranging _now, her heart alive and making demands.

"Dad and mom separated. I stayed with her - but depression set in for her. She was prone to that and the separation made it worse. She struggled financially. Eventually, she sent me across town to live with my grandma, with my dad's mother. But that gave him easy access to me, he didn't have to face mom to take me away, and we started going on...adventures together. Cons. He would use me, his cute little blond girl, as a device in the con. I thought it was fun and I got to spend time with him. Eventually, on one trip, we just never went back to grandmas. He kept me with him."

"It was great. Or so I thought. Until the day I realized it wasn't, the day I realized that there was nothing Robin Hood-like about our lives, that we were just wrong, legally, morally. But I was used to it by then, hardened even as a child, and I wanted my dad's approval."

Chuck broke in carefully. "So you kept doing it, even when you knew it was wrong."

"Yes," Sarah breathed, "I did. But I was - and I am not trying to excuse myself, just to capture my confusion - but my dad raised me with a con's conscience, taught to understand and judge as a con artist does. Later, when I came to consciousness that it was wrong, choosing not to do it felt like violating my conscience, but my conscience was...scrambled. Does that make any sense?"

"Sure," Chuck said, taking a moment to reflect. "I suppose everyone has had such a moment, at least on a small scale, a moment when we knew that something our parents had taught us was right was wrong, but when what we knew was wrong still seemed right. It's like that moment in _Huckleberry Finn…"_

"Twain?"

"Yes, when Huck lets Jim go, despite Jim's being a slave and Huck's being raised to think of slaves as _property_. Huck's conscience is...scrambled. At a deep level, he recognizes Jim's full humanity and the evil of thinking one person could own another, but his conscience still speaks with a Southern accent. Huck lets Jim go but Huck takes himself to be going to hell for doing it. But he still let Jim go. It's an amazing moment…"

Sarah stared up into the darkness. "It is. I need to read that, I guess. But I wasn't like Huck in a crucial way, I chose in favor of my scrambled conscience, in favor of the cons…"

"Well, you were a girl in her father's care, a girl who loved her father. I don't know that you chose the wrong as wrong; you chose out of love for him."

"How can you know that, Chuck? You don't know me." Sarah wished the words back after she said them.

But Chuck simply answered them. "I'm lying in the dark with you, holding your hand, after the most amazing kiss of my life. Maybe I don't know _about _you - but I know _you_. I...trust that I do."

Sarah did not respond in words but she squeezed his hand as she rolled on her side, bringing her body into contact with his, alongside him. She softly put her other hand on his chest.

She felt Chuck touch the bed on his opposite side, pat it. She felt him tense up.

"Sarah, why are we naked in robes in a freezing cell in which there is a double bed? Is this where we were supposed to end up?"

"'Supposed to'?"

Chuck sighed. "When I woke up the first time, there was a narrow cot in my cell, attached to the wall. It is gone now, replaced by a bed, a _double _bed. And now we are on it, kissing and talking and holding hands. Doesn't that seem fated, given how unlikely it also seems?"

Sarah's mind began to race.

"Not that I am complaining. I haven't been in a woman's bed in...well, in a long time. I haven't been kissed like that, ever. If I weren't in this black soup, I would think I had won some cosmic lottery…"

"I'm no prize, Chuck. I'm troubled, trouble...I have more baggage than I know how to carry."

"So, I can be your baggage handler." Sarah felt herself stop breathing after Chuck said that, felt him stop too. "Anyway, I'm sure baggage handlers make more money than Nerd Herders."

His words touched her but she covered it with a laugh. "Nerd Herder?"

"My specific job at the Buy More. Computer and electronics installation and repair - my specialty."

"So," Sarah said, "if I brought you a broken cell phone, you could fix it?"

"Yep. I'd be your guy."

Sarah's breath caught again.

She rolled on top of Chuck and claimed him in another kiss. She let her hands roam him this time, although she stayed above the terry cloth. He did the same.

The kiss was better than the one before it, which should have been a romantic impossibility. Again, Sarah pulled up anchor and let herself drift with the kiss, drift atop Chuck, open to the kiss and the feelings, the vast, consuming welter of feelings, it created. She got so lost in the kiss that she missed Chuck's hand as it found the outline of the timer in her robe's pocket. He slipped his hand into her pocket before she caught up with what was happening.

And then he was looking at it, the small, angry-red square numbers. She turned her head and saw it too. 22: 14.

Chuck pushed her off him and jumped out of the bed.

"What is this, Sarah? Where did you get it? What is it counting down to?"

Sarah took a moment before answering. "It's a timer."

Chuck blew out a breath, hurt, angry, frustrated. "_That's_ the question you answer? I know it's a timer, even if I asked. What the hell are you doing with it?"

* * *

Chuck felt bereft, standing there.

Lost in a bad way after being lost in a good way. Such a good way.

A few moments before, he had been kissing a woman whose voice and touch galvanized him. He had felt so much, been so aroused, emotionally, physically. She had the power to make him forget even his immediate surroundings, this enveloping black madness, and to envelope him in her.

Even in his happiest days with Jill, he knew where he ended and she began. He kept losing track of that with Sarah, as if the boundary between them was porous, as if they were made to share themselves with each other.

And then he felt the disc in her pocket.

She was timing things or on the clock. Somehow. She had not been lying to him during her confession. But maybe her kisses were lies, even if her words were not. The thought cut his heart, lacerated it. Stole the just-passed moments from him.

"Sarah, did you kiss me because you really wanted to kiss me, or did you kiss me on the clock, professionally?"

"'Professionally'?" Sarah sputtered the word, hurt in her voice. "What do you mean? I thought you said you _knew _me."

Chuck tossed the timer onto the bed. "I thought I did. But maybe that was just the side-effect of this bizarre Samuel Beckett play we seem to be in. _Endgame._ You, Hamm, me, Clov. 'Outside of here it's death.' But I guess that's your line."

Chuck heard her make a heartbreaking, heartbroken sound. He turned from her to the bars of the cell.

* * *

A/N: Lots of readers, few responses. Let me hear from you. It's lonely in the writer's cell.


	7. Unit Seven: Rules

Chuck Bartowski downloads the Intersect and becomes a prisoner in the same night. Who has taken him and why? Is the stranger in the facing cell a friend or a foe?

* * *

A/N1: Short but dense. Introspection. Back to dialogue in the next chapter.

* * *

**Labyrinth**

* * *

Unit Seven: Rule

* * *

RULE, noun [Latin regula, from rego, to govern, that is, to stretch, strain or make straight.]

1\. Government; sway; empire; control; supreme command or authority.  
2\. That which is established as a principle, standard or directory; that by which any thing is to be adjusted or regulated, or to which it is to be conformed; that which is settled by authority or custom for guidance and direction. Thus a statute or law is a rule of civil conduct; a canon is a rule of ecclesiastical government; the precept or command of a father is a rule of action or obedience to children; precedents in law are rules of decision to judges; maxims and customs furnish rules for regulating our social opinions and manners.

3\. An instrument by which lines are drawn.  
4\. Established mode or course of proceeding prescribed in private life. Every man should have some fixed rules for managing his own affairs.  
5\. In literature, a maxim, canon or precept to be observed in any art or science.  
6\. In monasteries, corporations or societies, a law or regulation to be observed by the society and its particular members.  
7\. In courts, rules are the determinations and orders of court, to be observed by its officers in conducting the business of the court.  
8\. In arithmetic and algebra, a determinate mode prescribed for performing any operation and producing a certain result.  
9\. In grammar, an establish form of construction in a particular class of words; or the expression of that form in words. Thus it is a rule in English, that -s or -es, added to a noun in the singular number, forms the plural of that noun; but _man_ forms its plural _men_, and is an exception to the rule.

RULE, verb transitive

1\. To govern; to control the will and actions of others, either by arbitrary power and authority, or by established laws. The emperors of the east rule their subjects without the restraints of a constitution. In limited governments, men are ruled by known laws.  
2\. To govern the movements of things; to conduct; to manage; to control. That God rules the world he has created, is a fundamental article of belief.  
3\. To manage; to conduct, in almost any manner.  
4\. To settle as by a rule.  
5\. To mark with lines by a ruler; as, to rule a blank book.  
6\. To establish by decree or decision; to determine; as a court.

RULE, verb intransitive

To have power or command; to exercise supreme authority. It is often followed by _over._

* * *

Sarah was hurt by Chuck's words.

She wasn't prepared for them, or for that. Perhaps she should have been prepared for them. She was keeping secrets from Chuck - or she had been trying to. But it had just gotten harder to do it. Perhaps she should have expected the hurt: she had already found that his words could hurt her - and help her - in deep and novel ways.

Bryce's professional opinion of her had mattered to her - far more than his opinion of her personally. Perhaps that was because she knew he did not know her and knew that she did not know him. They had been spies together but they had never been intimate, except in the barest physical sense of the term. In a way, the only real closeness they had was achieved in what they came to know in spying on each other - watching, monitoring, observing, tallying, evaluating each other. But the motive was not a desire to increase in closeness, but a need to be in control, for each to be ahead of the other. It was done to foreclose upon not to increase vulnerability. Each had the other under surveillance.

She had been okay with that, had taken that to be all - in terms of intimacy - she could hope for and perhaps, almost certainly, more than she deserved. Later, when Bryce became distant, she realized that he had become _more distant_. He had never been close. They shared a bed and slept together, but never _slept _together unless the cover demanded it. Often, even when the cover had them in a shared hotel room, they still parted after sex, if they had sex, and slept, one in the bed, the other on the couch. At the same time that Bryce became more distant, Sarah also realized that she was _alone_, and had been since the beginning of their affair.

That had seemed to her a final verdict on her life - at least as far as intimacy went. Real intimacy, meaningful closeness with another person for whom the closeness was meaningful in the same way, _mutual mutuality_ \- she might see that exemplified in the lives of lucky others but she would always only be a spectator. Fitting, since she was a human specter. She was too closed to be close - close to anyone.

And yet, in a few in-the-dark hours, she had come to feel close to a man she could not see but had tasted and felt. A man she heard and whose words seemed unaffected by her years of evasion and self-evasion, or eliding and self-eliding, words that went straight to the heart she was not supposed to have.

'Professional'. _Oh, God. _How could she explain? If _they_ were listening… And if she told him about the orders, her activation, he would think all she had done - the kisses and the confession - were her following her orders, fulfilling her spy obligations. But they were not that. She was doing what she wanted to do - she wanted to kiss him, hold him, talk to him, tell him things - but each of those was not only what she wanted, each was also plausibly an action performed under command. It was like she had wanted to run, started to run, at the very moment someone yelled, "Go!" She wouldn't be obeying the command, following it, but she would be acting in accordance with it, performing the very action that would be obedient to it, had the rule been her motive. She had not kissed Chuck because the metallic voice commanded her to find out about the Intersect by any means necessary, that was _not_ her motive. But how could she convince him of that, given she had acted in accordance with the command? How could she convince Chuck she was not obeying it?

Sarah began to get angry. At the word, 'professional', whatever exactly Chuck meant by it, but more at the situation, her impossible plight. From the earliest days of realizing what she and her father had been doing, she had felt trapped, felt as if what she was doing was involuntary, something she chose only from among more desperate options.

That had continued with Graham. No sane person wanted to grow up to be Graham's Enforcer, the Ice Queen, a CIA assassin. But she had.

It was a matter of rules. They had been her lifeline. Her father had started it, his incessant preaching of the rules of con artistry. "The good con never…", "The good con always…", and so on and on. She had internalized those rules before she was old enough to assess them, and then they had confused her assessment of other things as she got older. Scrambled her. Even when she came to see that what she and her father were doing was wrong, she kept the rules, would not break with her con artist's duty, would not break with or disappoint her father. She was suspicious of the rules but remained bound by them.

Graham taught her a new set of rules. And she corrupted her consciousness again and on a larger scale - hid from herself the recognition that Graham's rules were bad rules, bad rules for a bad business. It was easier just to obey the rules, and to take a certain carrion comfort in her strict obedience to them. That was how she became the Enforcer, the Ice Queen. Emotionless, unquestioning, immediately responsive to command. She became a sham, a sham that she took to be the genuine article, the real Sarah.

Until Budapest. Until Budapest and the baby forced her into a choice between what was deepest in her - all that she had tried to disown over so many years - and all the rules she had lived by. Her father's commandments and Graham's commandments shattered like tablets of stone - the severe sanctions disobedience promised seemed nothing to Sarah in the balance against the innocent life.

She would have died to save that little girl. No calculation of The Greater Good, just a recognition of what was absolutely good, that the innocent life was of infinite value.

Sarah's bowdlerized sense of who she was fell apart. It had not returned since then and she knew it had not when she talked on the phone to Graham about Chuck, Charles Bartowski. She was immediately suspicious of Graham and his motives, and she was not remotely tempted to take his view that Bartowski (as Graham called him) was likely in on it with Bryce. She had not expressed her suspicion, but for the first time, Graham's commands seemed backed by sanctions too feeble and insufficient to move her against her growing conviction, her conviction that obeying his commands was disobedience to the best in her, to whatever it was in her that compelled her to save the baby girl. It might not have been much, but it had been enough to save Molly and to find Molly a new home.

Sarah was tired, so deathly tired of rules and commandments. She was not a machine to be _activated. _She was a woman - a woman in the dark, but blinking in the blinding light of her newly inflamed heart.

"'Professional', Chuck? Do you want to spell out what you mean for me?" Her anger caused her to almost spit out the question.

* * *

Chuck squeezed the icy bars in his hands. He regretted that word as soon as he used it. But he did not understand: what was she doing with a timer? He did not have one. Given that everything they now had was supplied by...them...whoever they were...it had to be significant that Sarah had the timer and he did not. And if she had it, she had to know what it _meant, _she had to be using it.

He still should not have said what he said. It sounded like he was calling her...a prostitute. Nothing in his flash suggested anything of that sort. His own gut told him it was not true. And if her kisses had been insincere, Chuck was prepared to give up on kisses altogether, because he did not know how any sincere one could compare.

As he stood there gripping the bars, his old sense of his own helplessness and passivity washed over him. He was living his life but not leading it. The Buy More had been a five-month plan, not a five-year plan, but the days and then the weeks and then the months had gotten away from him, lost in a multicolored haze of Subway sandwiches and video games, movies and graphic novels. Of lonely midnight ones-and-zeros trysts with Irene Demova.

Chuck felt his face burn in the dark, a contrast to the icy bars in his hands.

His best friend, Morgan, did not want to grow up and Chuck joined him in the Buy More's Neverland, appropriately green. But just by talking to Chuck in the dark, Sarah had enlivened him, made him feel alive. She had somehow shifted him from a continuous _passio _to a continuous _actio_\- Latin, no doubt Sarah would know the terms - from patient to agent. Even what he said to her was an expression of that, of his new sense of himself as capable of resisting, of push-back, as capable of riding his feelings instead of being ridden by them.

He needed to become master, ruler of himself, of his life, to issue decrees to himself instead of letting circumstance - or Big Mike, the Buy More Manager - tell him what to do, who to be.

"Look, I take that word back, Sarah, and I'm sorry for it. I'm usually more respectful, even when I'm angry. But I am angry. Please be straight with me, or I'm going to have to believe everything between us is...has been...crooked. Why do you have a timer?"

* * *

Sarah felt an abyss open under her, a brutal emptiness somehow deeper and darker than the one she was in with Chuck.

Every once in a while, in the night, on a mission, after everything was planned, all contingencies accounted for, when there was nothing to do but wait, Sarah had found herself suspended above the same abyss.

In those moments, she wondered if her blank unhappiness, her artic loneliness, resulted from crimes, something wrong she had done, or from disorder, something wrong with her. Neither seemed quite right but she could not grasp a third option. It did not seem the result of crime, because she had never really chosen her life - not as an adult might make a choice between options right and wrong. It did not seem the result of disorder, because her life was not entirely a matter of the impact of hostile forces upon her, but to her own tendency to shrink from herself and from her own experiences and feelings, to her self-mistrust. In those moments, she came to the conclusion that she was in a worse position than either the criminal or the person disordered: the disordered person could still have her integrity (say, even in the face of disease), and the criminal could still be fortunate. She had lost her integrity, and no one who understood her life could possibly count her fortunate. She lived in pieces and she lived under a curse.

For years, she had been a lost soul. And in those moments, suspended above that abyss, she knew that she was, that she was suspended above hell.

She felt that again, hell beneath her, a gaping, hungry nothingness ready to claim her, to make her nothing too.

Sarah spoke, expecting the words to seal her fate with Chuck, deprive her even of the slimmest chance that something might exist between them in the light. But she spoke, hoping to avoid the plummet into the abyss.

"They gave it to me. I am supposed to get you to tell me about the Intersect," she paused so that the full effect of her final words would be obvious, "and I was told to do it by any means necessary."

* * *

A/N2: A conceptually demanding chapter, I know, so I kept it short. This is the thematic middle of our story; this chapter and the next are it's hardest moments (although they hard in different ways). See you for Chapter 8, "Cleave", posting soon.


	8. Unit Eight: Cleave

Chuck Bartowski downloads the Intersect and becomes a prisoner in the same night. Who has taken him and why? Is the stranger in the facing cell a friend or a foe?

* * *

**Labyrinth**

* * *

Unit Eight: Cleave

* * *

CLEAVE, verb intransitive

1\. To stick; to adhere; to hold to.

2\. To unite aptly; to fit; to sit well on.  
3\. To unite or be united closely in interest or affection; to adhere with strong attachment.

CLEAVE, verb transitive

1\. To part or divide by force; to split or rive; to open or serve the cohering parts of a body, by cutting or by the application of force; as, to cleave wood; to cleave a rock; to cleave the flood.  
2\. To part or open naturally.

CLEAVE, verb intransitive

To part; to open; to crack; to separate, as parts of cohering bodies; as, the ground cleaves by frost.

* * *

Silence thickened the darkness. Chuck did not respond even though Sarah waited.

Sarah got up off the bed. She did not want to be on the bed for this conversation.

She heard Chuck turn back to the bars. He had faced her to ask his last question. She heard him exhale slowly.

The silence got louder. Sarah felt herself tremble, cold, plus an access of emotion. She wanted to walk to him, touch Chuck, make him understand her feelings, her motives. But she felt like any initiative by her might make it seem like she was pushing him, following her orders. But she could not just stand there, trembling. Aching in the return of her artic loneliness.

"Chuck, how do you know '_a posteriori'_?"

Silence, She heard him inhale, exhale.

But he answered. "Well, I don't know Latin. I studied computers at Stanford, but my real interest was Artificial Intelligence. So, I took a lot of cognitive science classes, philosophy classes. You can't study the history of thinking about intelligence otherwise. And you can't make it far in philosophy of mind classes without learning a whole heap of otherwise useless technical Latin terms...Remember, I almost-graduated smart."

He finished and the silence returned.

Sarah: "So you studied Artificial Intelligence - and now you are one?"

Chuck hissed more than laughed and Sarah regretted her question. She was not trying to make light of anything, just keep Chuck talking to her. She had not needed Chuck's comment about his logorrhea to know he processed best by talking, not by brooding in silence. She needed him to process now, to understand. To believe her.

"I am my own study, I guess." His voice sounded stony, bitter. "_I compute, therefore I am._"

She laughed but without much enthusiasm. "Chuck, will you let me explain?"

He huffed at her. "I asked, didn't I?"

He was quiet then he added. "Sorry, I don't know what to think. I'm so tired of being in this dark-on-dark. I have no idea where I am - and wherever it is, I'm lost there. It's like being lost at sea on an unknown desert island and then getting lost on the island. - Did you ever see that TV show, _Firefly_?"

"No, I've watched some late-night movies, usually old black and white ones - antidotes for insomnia, preventatives for keeping vigil...with my thoughts."

"The show has one of the great episodes of TV, it's called _Objects in Space_…"

"Why are you asking me about it?"

"The...villain of the episode, I guess you'd call him, Jubal Early...is weirdly fascinated with objects in space. Not any particular ones, really, just any of them...all of them...Jubal Early is a bounty-hunter…"

"In...outer space?"

"Oh, um, yeah, the show was a Western space opera. A cowboy movie in space, basically. I guess I was thinking of it because I was thinking about how the dark seems to deprive you of space, especially the longer you are in it. Space seems like it closes in the dark, as if it swallowed all the objects in it…"

Sarah's feeling of the abyss returned and she trembled again. She felt, and heard, her teeth chatter. She hugged herself, tightening the knot on her robe. "Well, we're still here in the dark, Chuck. And we are objects in space."

He laughed at that with some enthusiasm. "Yeah, that we are. So, you were going to explain?"

Sarah turned and picked up the timer. 22: 00.

"When we got tranqed earlier, they took me somewhere...else. I couldn't see anyone; a bright light was on and I was tied to a chair. Someone spoke to me through a voice-scrambler. I don't know if it was a man or a woman, but whoever it was had my activation code."

"Activation code?"

"Like my personal password. When I am given it, I am to do as commanded."

"And...the voice...wanted to know about this thing in my head? My artificial intelligence?"

"Yes."

"But why the indirection? Why not take me, instead of you and…" - Chuck gulped - "probe me with needles or run Dr. Frankenstein experiments on me, making me...flash? Why keep me in the dark?"

"I don't know. It didn't make any sense to me. The voice said that they thought the Intersect, you, could only be triggered visually."

"Well, that might explain keeping me in the dark, but it would also mean that I couldn't really find out what the Intersect could do." Chuck stopped talking abruptly. "Do you think they are listening?"

"They took my detector. I don't know...but I don't think so. I don't understand it, but the longer we are here, the less likely it seems that they are listening. My instinct tells me they aren't - but that just makes no sense. They'd have to expect that I would tell them anything I learn and tell it to them accurately…"

"But why would they think that?"

Sarah felt her mouth go dry. "Because of my reputation…"

"Your reputation?"

"Was there anything in your flash on me about an Enforcer or an Ice Queen?"

"No...is that like some comic book character or something, like the Punisher?"

Sarah wet her lips. "No, Chuck, those are..._nicknames_ for me."

"Why would anyone call you that?"

"Because my reputation...my reputation was..._is_…'efficient killer, cold-blooded and unquestioning of her orders, immediately responsive'."

"So they expected you to…?"

"_Succeed_, Chuck. I don't fail, really, never have. No black marks on my record."

"Are you proud of that, given what your record is a record _of_?"

"No. But I can't deny that there was a time when I was, or believed that I was. When doing my job well was my entire focus. I had blinders on; I didn't look left or right. I just stared down the mission objectives and I...achieved them."

"Didn't you think about what you were doing?"

"In one way, yes, Chuck, in another way, no."

"I don't understand." He made a sound like he was in pain.

Sarah wet her lips again, her mouth still dry. "I planned, Chuck, considered variables, possible problems. I am very good at strategy, tactics. I was a ghost, a specter, often in and out without leaving any trace but...a body. Sometimes," she paused, "not even that. But I did not think about what I was doing in any way except as a...means-end...problem. I did not ask questions about the ends or about what the ends were themselves a means to. I just did not allow myself to think about any of it in those terms."

"So, it's sort of like calling living human beings 'soft targets' or 'hostiles', a way of masking the reality of what you are doing behind a euphemism or a pseudo-technical term?"

Sarah nodded, then remembered Chuck could not see her. "Yes."

"But you were taught to do that, right? Isn't there some kind of CIA _school _or something?"

"The Farm."

"God, talk about a euphemism. I bet there's not a farmer in sight. E-I-E-I-O."

"No, no farmers."

"Let me ask you something, Sarah. Could you have just walked away, quit? Turned in a letter of resignation and ridden off into the sunset?"

She sat down on the bed, pulling her legs against her. The cold was beginning to bother her, her numbness becoming a pins-and-needles burning. It wasn't cold enough in the cell for frostbite but it was too cold for the terry cloth robe. Except for the brief moments of contact with Chuck, she felt like she had been cold for hours. Forever.

"Technically, yes. But almost everyone who becomes an agent stays one, or stays with the Agency in some capacity. Especially people who...do what I have done."

"Why?"

"Most who choose the CIA are misfits to begin with. High-achieving misfits but misfits still. And doing the job - just the more standard job - misfits you even more. It's not a natural life, normal. Everything is upside down."

"And you had already been upside-down for a long time before you started…" Chuck tacked on softly.

Sarah paused, reflecting. "Yeah, I had. And Graham...recruited me...while I was still technically too young even to be an agent. Everything you recited from my paperwork was on it, but my age was faked. Graham made me old enough to sign; I was actually seventeen."

Chuck sighed heavily. "And how soon after you started did you start...as an assassin?"

"A few years. But it was obvious to me early on what Graham had in mind for me."

"And, still, you stayed?"

Sarah hugged her knees to her. "I did. My dad was in jail. I hadn't seen my mom in years, not even talked to her; I don't know why. Maybe I was just too ashamed of it all to face her. I was alone. My skills were all...outside the law. I could see no other option."

"But you could have said no, refused to do what Graham wanted?"

"There was a moment, yes, where I could have. But Graham is...clever, a fox. He chose me for a reason.."

"What reason?"

"Have you ever seen _Grosse Pointe Blank_, Chuck?"

"Sure, but I'm surprised you have."

"Me too. But it came on late one night and I couldn't find anything else and I was all alone...I watched it. There's that scene where Martin…"

"Martin Blank."

"Yeah, where Martin...Blank explains to the woman he loves what he's been doing. He tells her that they chose him because of a certain 'moral flexibility'."

Chuck's comment was a whisper. "I remember."

Sarah did not go on. The darkness darkened around them - or so it seemed to her.

Chuck: "Graham chose you because you were _morally flexible_?"

"More or less. He knew enough of my background to see my...potential. He knew how I had been raised, knew I was as good as my father at...my father's work. The CIA just seemed like, the Farm just seemed like...a natural extension of my life."

"Goddamn, Sarah."

She dropped her head on her knees. "That scene haunted me. I wished I had never seen it."

"But Blank, Sarah, he left the CIA or whatever branch of the government he worked for…"

"I know, but what did he do afterward?"

"He went _freelance_."

"Exactly. People who do what I do become...hardened to it. Some come to like it. I didn't but I kept at it, just like I kept at conning with my dad."

"Graham _was_ clever."

Sarah made a bitter sound, sickened by the truth of it. "People who do what I do eventually die doing it. And that is how the CIA actually wants it to go. They aren't in any hurry for...monsters...to be loosed on unsuspecting good folks, folks like you or your sister. And even if a person like me leaves, there are...enemies...people with scores to settle...people who were friends or relatives or in some way loyal to the person's..targets."

"So once an assassin, always an assassin?"

"Yes." Sarah felt her doom draw near in the dark, the abyss beginning to yawn beneath her again.

"But your circumstance...it's unique. Blank was morally flexible, but he got better. He went to his reunion with his girlfriend, turned his life around."

"Well, they got out of town. We don't really know what happened next, do we?"

"But his girlfriend - Debi - she would never have left Grosse Pointe with...a monster. He saved her dad, her, himself. Aren't her feelings for him proof that he had changed? Isn't she his proof, his pledge, his plight of a new life?" She felt Chuck move away from the bars, closer to her.

"I don't know. I've wondered about that, about whether he could have lived a normal life with her somewhere, been happy…"

She felt Chuck get closer still.

"_That's it,_ isn't it," he asked, as he drew close to the bed. "You don't think you could ever live a normal life, find anyone who would run the risk of trying to live a normal life with you?"

"Why would anyone want to? Imagine, Chuck,...Imagine we were together, outside, in the light. You know what I have done, what I have been. What I am. Would you risk it? Risk your happiness on me?"

Chuck was beside the bed now, near enough to touch her or be touched. He did not answer. Sarah sighed against her will. _This was it_ \- Chuck was right. Since Molly, since Budapest, Sarah had been asking herself that question. She did not think she could do normal. She certainly did not think she could do it _alone. _She did not want to - she'd been alone so long. Alone, she would be left to her own devices...and her devices were bent, crooked, ruled wrong, the lines on her pages blurry and indistinct

In the ordinary world, the normal world, she would be a beginner among beginners, but worse, a beginner with all the wrong instincts.

She should have told Chuck everything when they woke up, when she found the timer. She wanted to tell him but...she was afraid.

Not afraid for herself in terms of dying, but in terms of living. How could she start over when she was already so far behind? But how could she keep living a life that was killing her - that she now knew was killing her? She could not hide that from herself any longer.

But mostly she had been thinking of Chuck, hoping to save him at least, save him from _them. _

She wanted Chuck to get out of the dark even if it swallowed her. She was willing to become nothing if she could save him; he was something to her. Everything. It made no sense. She had not seen his face. They had never made love. She knew very little about him. What he knew about her was all damning knowledge. She could not fall in love with a man she had not seen, a man with a computer in his head.

But - a man with her in his heart. _Terra incognita. _She had never been in anyone's heart before. Never. Certainly not as herself. She was in his; she knew it. They had known each other a few hours. They had known each other forever: time in the dark was not passing at a normal rate.

Chuck cleared his throat. When he spoke, his voice sounded choked. "The timer, that's how long you have to do whatever it is they want you to do, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"And they told you, the voice told you, that if you fail, I will die. They will kill me."

"Yes."

"You've been trying to figure out how to save me."

Not a question. Sarah did not respond. But then Chuck was on the bed beside her. He put his arm around her and pulled her against his side. She turned at the waist and cleaved to him.

They sat like that for a long time. Sarah held the timer in her fist but did not look at it. After a lifetime passed, she felt Chuck kiss the top of her head.

"We need to get out of here, Sarah."

"I know. I've been thinking about it, but I don't have a plan. I can't see..."

"Maybe I do," he said, his voice clear now, certain despite the 'maybe'.

"Really?" She spoke the question softly, into the fabric of his robe. She caught his scent and she felt herself relax, independent of any thought she had. He pulled her closer.

"I think I know where we are."

"How?"

"Not like it sounds. What I mean is that I think they are keeping us in the dark because the Intersect would recognize this place, this...facility...or whatever it is. They've kept us in the dark because there is something they don't want me to see. They can't risk me seeing it and getting away."

Sarah thought about it. It was possible. There was no reason to think the voice had told her the truth about anything but her activation code. That the voice knew it was significant, and at another time in her life, it might have had the effect the voice expected it to have. Maybe she and Chuck could surprise them?

"I also think they expected us to...be at odds with each other, or at any rate, they never expected we would be...like we are. Maybe they thought you would...succeed, and I would be your pawn. I don't know. But I don't think they expected us to...like...each other."

She felt Chuck tremble and she pulled him even closer to her. "Are you cold?"

"Hell, yes, but not so bad now."

"But you are trembling…"

"I know. That's...um...partly your fault."

"Partly?"

"My head's killing me, Sarah. It got worse after the flash and it has kept getting worse since. I didn't want to worry you, but...I think I may be...rejecting...the Intersect. It's working, but it is doing something to me."

Sarah felt the panic rise in her. "Then we need to get you out of here, Chuck, now."

He tightened his arms, keeping her from moving. "I don't think we're at any critical stage yet. But I need you to keep doing what you've been doing."

"Holding you?" She hugged him harder. They were completely enveloping each other.

"Yes, that, but also the other thing."

"What?"

"Telling me the truth."

"Huh?"

"The Intersect tells me every time you lie, Sarah."

She sat back. "What?"

"Yeah, I flash, I guess. A buzzer sounds in my head. And when I lie too - except that it hurts me actively for it."

Sarah's mouth was open but she did not know what to say. She leaned her head against him again, trying to think it through, to think about what she had told him since they had been in the cell.

After a few minutes, she spoke. "So, what do we do?"

"As weird as this sounds, I need to sleep. I think I'll feel better if I do. After I go to sleep, you need to call for them, tell them you know what they want to know."

"Do I?"

"I have no idea. But make it convincing. I'll pretend to sleep if I wake up. We need them to turn on the lights. And then I need you to save us. Be the Enforcer one more time, Sarah."

"But if I do - if I save us - what then, Chuck?" She finished the question and held her breath.

"Don't call me that."

"What?"

"Chuck."

"But…"

"No, just call me Debi."

And with that, Chuck leaned back on the bed, scooted up so that his feet were off the floor.

It took Sarah a minute to understand.

Sarah smiled in the dark. She could not help it.

* * *

A/N: More soon. Nearing the conclusion of the story. Drop me a line, please!


	9. Unit Nine: Wrong

Chuck Bartowski downloads the Intersect and becomes a prisoner in the same night. Who has taken him and why? Is the stranger in the facing cell a friend or a foe?

* * *

**Labyrinth**

* * *

Unit Nine: Wrong

* * *

WRONG, adjective Literally wrung, twisted or turned from a straight line or even surface. Hence,

1\. Not physically right; not fit or suitable; as the wrong side of a garment. You hold the book the wrong end uppermost. There may be something wrong in the construction of a watch or an edifice.  
2\. Not morally right; that deviates from the line of rectitude prescribed by God; not just or equitable; not right or proper; not legal; erroneous; as a wrong practice; wrong ideas; a wrong course of life; wrong measures; wrong inclinations and desires; a wrong application of talents; wrong judgment.  
3\. Erroneous; not according to truth; as a wrong statement.

WRONG, noun Whatever deviates from moral rectitude; any injury done to another; a trespass; a violation of right. Wrongs are private or public. Private wrongs are civil injuries, immediately affecting individuals; public wrongs are crimes and misdemeanors which affect the community.

WRONG, adverb Not rightly; amiss; morally ill; erroneously.

WRONG, verb transitive

1\. To injure; to treat with injustice; to deprive of some right, or to withhold some act of justice from. We wrong a man, when we defraud him, and when we trespass on his property. We wrong a man, when we neglect to pay him his due.

2\. To do injustice to by imputation; to impute evil unjustly. If you suppose me capable of a base act, you wrong me.

* * *

Sarah was still smiling as she positioned herself next to Chuck on the bed, wrapping her arms around him.

She pillowed her head on his chest, and could hear his heart beating. And then she heard him start to hum again.

She lifted her head. "I thought you were going to sleep."

"I am, or I'm going to try. I feel so exhausted, like I've got two brains in my head and they are racing each other. Like that Stephen Wright joke about a car - 'I put a new engine in my car, but forgot to take the old one out. I can now drive _600 miles an hour_.' But I was just humming a song with a verse about sleep."

"What song?"

"It's called _Am I Wrong? _It's by Love Spit Love."

"Huh. Interesting name - the band's, I mean."

"Yeah, it's Richard Butler's band, one formed after The Psychedelic Furs."

"I liked the sound of it. I...like it when you sing." Sarah felt for a second like a highschool girl on a date. Madness.

Chuck sang in a low voice:

"_I'm so tired  
Of my mood  
And sleep comes  
With a knife, fork and a spoon_

_You're so pale  
In your face  
You let life  
Get in your way_

_And I've seen  
You don't need their seeds  
When their dirt goes in deep  
And I'm lost in sleep_

_Am I wrong?_

_Goodbye, lay the blame on luck  
Goodbye, lay the blame on luck…_

That's how it goes. Not exactly a lullaby but it jumped into my head. You'd like it."

She pillowed her head again. "I do like it. It's sad. Sing some more."

"It starts like this.

_There's too much  
__That I keep to myself…_"

Chuck sang on for a moment then stopped singing, faded out, and Sarah realized he had fallen asleep. She snuggled against him more completely, warming herself, and it occurred to her that earlier she had been asking herself about _love. _

That was not one of her words.

Not that she had many, really, if you required that she speak them to have them.

_Love._ Had she ever _loved_ a man?

Bryce was the only candidate. _He_ believed she loved him. He made that claim on her behalf a couple of times when they were partners, teasing her about her emotional unavailability. More than teasing, really; nagging her about it. But he had never loved _her_ \- or if he had, he loved her as a reflection of himself, showing himself back to him as he imagined he had to be if she were with him: handsome, commanding, exciting - the sort of man who could attract such a woman.

She had not loved Bryce, though. Maybe that was sad, maybe not, but it was true.

Perhaps she had wanted to love him, perhaps she had believed that what they had was what counted as love for someone like her. _Spy love _\- not love but its espionage analog.

But the baby, and now Chuck...She was not willing to use 'love' in either case, not because she denied it but because she was ignorant of how to use it - but whatever the word that belonged to them was, the feeling Bryce had caused in her was not remotely at the depth of the emotion the baby caused or of the different but equally deep feeling Chuck was causing in her. She was not sure about herself and love - but she knew she could feel deeply for a child, for a man, in a non-espionage way. Budapest had cracked her open, had let light shine into her darkness, the baby. And now events had conspired to break her open altogether: Chuck was shining into her darkness. Even in the darkness.

_Love._ Love at first sight. She had yet to see Chuck, and yet…

Who was Agent Sarah Walker? Did she really exist or was she the cover under all the other covers that Sarah kept in place to protect who she really was, that girl she had told Chuck about, the one she thought she had given up on but who, perhaps, she had spent her life trying to save, but who she had to forget if she was to save her?

Maybe her instinct to save the baby, Molly, had been a form of her instinct to save herself, to hide herself away from herself, away from Agent Walker, so that the true Sarah, that girl, could survive the lies and blood without being utterly destroyed. Agent Walker was that girl's Kevlar vest, her shield - not a real person, just as the girl she protected was not a whole person - a protectress for the seed of a person deep inside her, an Agent's badge shielding her fragile heart?

But if that was so, could she possibly shed the Kevlar, the shield, and let that girl take root, grow, become whatever she had been destined to be? Or was Agent Walker a set of habits so long indulged, so long cultivated, so long cloven to, that she could not be cloven from, but was now the only reality possible, the girl inside her no longer viable?

It was all so twisty, so labyrinthine. Sarah Walker was a sham; the true Sarah all but finally disowned. The sham a reality, the reality embryonic. Was it too late to right herself, to escape from all the wrongs she had done, done to herself, all the wrongs that had been done to her?

How much of the true girl was left?

_There's too much  
__That I keep to myself…_

_Am I wrong?_

She listened to Chuck's heartbeat, slow and steady. _Alive_. She could feel hers synchronous with his, his nearness and warmth and scent keeping her calm somehow.

_Where there's life, there's hope. _

Maybe that was not a Hallmark Card bromide. Maybe its deeper truth only shone in the dark. Maybe you had to hear it at the right time, say it to the right person, and have them say it back and mean it. Words were funny that way.

_Am I wrong?_

* * *

Sarah's nearness warmed Chuck as he drifted toward asleep. He could not pull everything that was happening to them into focus, but he was getting clearer about it. The Intersect was faulty. One problem was the lie detection. Or maybe that was two problems?

Even though the Intersect was in Chuck's head, it was not an organic part of Chuck, any part of what he was essentially. So, it made sense that if it could detect lies in someone speaking to the person with it, it would detect lies when that person told one. The Intersect could not distinguish the voice of its bearer from the voice of someone talking to its bearer.

The pain that lying caused - that was more of a puzzle. He guessed it was some feature of the interface between the Intersect and the conscience of the bearer of it, some effect that the guilt of lying caused. But he would have to know more about the Intersect to figure that out. Still, it seemed an obvious flaw in a program supposed to create superspies, super liars, unless the view was that such a spy would have no conscience.

Sarah had a conscience. He was sure of it now. It was erroneous, scrambled to a degree, but there was decency deep inside her that quarreled with what was erroneous and scrambled in her conscience. She thought her hands were dirty, and to an extent, that was right, but she was wrong to blame herself as she did. She had been wronged more than she had done wrong, and much she blamed herself for was the responsibility of her father and of Langston Graham. She had been pushed and pulled, manipulated and distorted, bent, spindled and mutilated. She was not simply a victim - but she was a victim. She had come to believe or half-believe in her own reputation.

She was also remarkable. Her record was not the unbroken string of assassinations she seemed to remember it to be, that it had seemed to be to Chuck in the shock of the initial flash. The record, like the woman, was complicated, intricate, a puzzle. He ran through her file again in his head; it was available for recollection after the flash. They sped past his mind's eye, even as he headed toward sleep.

Numerous of her missions involved her saving others, often others that were not included in mission parameters - 'acceptable losses', or people who had simply wandered into her missions unknowingly. There was no record of cruelty - her efficiency was to some extent a form of kindness. Her targets died quickly, mercifully; rarely was there was collateral damage.

Damage.

A mission to Budapest was the last and the most fascinating of her missions. Graham had been complimentary in his report on the mission, but the language was restrained, perfunctory. The mission had been unusually bloody, brutal. Sarah had killed almost a dozen Mafiosi in what must have been a hellish firefight.

She had done it so as to obtain a _package_. Graham never named that package in his report, but Sarah had gone off the grid with it, killed her handler in order to do so. The Intersect triangulated temporally. There were stories of a wealthy couple, dead, and a baby girl, missing, heir to their mighty fortune. The stories tallied with Sarah's mission: the package had been the baby girl, all the lines of the Intersect crossed on that answer, leaving no room for doubt.

Sarah saved that baby at the risk of her own life, against the orders of her handler, against Graham's obvious expectations. Her reputation was not her destiny. She could go against orders. But the whole Budapest mission seemed...off, especially through the many-facet lens of the Intersect. Why would she have been sent on it, Graham's Enforcer, suddenly given a handler? Given a mission the parameters of which were obscured, a mission where she was kept in the figurative dark, only to be sent into a gangland maelstrom, expected to take a baby, unexpected, and hand it over?

The pain in Chuck's head began to sink into the background. He fell asleep, his mind in Budapest with Sarah, his arms around her in the dark, wherever they were.

Just as he slipped into interior darkness, on the shoreline of dreams, he heard his father's voice, a comment echoing from the distance of years, made in a conversation after watching _The Terminator _together, a conversation about Artificial Intelligence: "The thing about machines, Chuck, the reason they can never replicate human intelligence, is that machines just don't give a damn."

* * *

Chuck had been asleep for a long while. Sarah had dozed, cat-like, an old skill, rolled close into his side. She stirred and rose carefully, trying to leave him asleep. He seemed to think the plan - whatever it was - would work best if he were asleep or they believed he was.

Of course: he wanted them to turn on the lights. If they were trying to keep him in the dark, and he was asleep, they might be more willing to turn on the lights.

Chuck was not a spy but she, the spy, trusted him, trusted his plan, even if she did not know quite what it was; she would act on it as he asked. If anyone hurt him - well, she would hurt them back.

She grabbed the timer, 19:32, and dropped it in the pocket of her robe.

She crossed silently on her cold, bare feet to the bars. She cleared her throat and spoke, not too loudly, but loud enough to be heard if someone were nearby, waiting for her to make contact.

"I have it. I have what you want. But Bartowski, the Intersect, is acting strange, like he's in pain; he passed out or something!"

Silence. She glanced back into the dark. She did not hear Chuck stir. Chuck. _Debi. _Sarah's heart swelled.

Then a sound, something sliding, outside the cell. She tightened the knot on her robe.

They thought she was a machine to be activated.

_Time to show them how wrong they are._

* * *

A/N: Some final issues to touch on. One longish final chapter to go. I could use the encouragement: let me hear from you. One last chapter.

Oh, give that Love Spit Love song a listen. I've been playing it on my guitar as I work on this story. Its influence extends far beyond this chapter.

Zettel


	10. Unit Ten: Run

Chuck Bartowski downloads the Intersect and becomes a prisoner in the same night. Who has taken him and why? Is the stranger in the facing cell a friend or a foe?

* * *

**Labyrinth**

* * *

Unit Ten: Run

* * *

RUN, verb intransitive preterit tense ran or run; participle passive run

1\. To move or pass in almost any manner, as on the feet or on wheels.  
2\. To move or pass on the feet with celerity or rapidity, by leaps or long quick steps.  
3\. To use the legs in moving; to step; as, children run alone or run about.  
4\. To move in a hurry.  
5\. To proceed along the surface; to extend; to spread; as, the fire runs over a field or forest.  
6\. To rush with violence; as, a ship runs against a rock.  
7\. To move or pass on the water; to sail.  
8\. To contend in a race; as, men or horses run for a prize.  
9\. To flee for escape.  
10\. To depart privately; to steal away.  
11\. To flow in any manner, slowly or rapidly; to move or pass; as a fluid.  
12\. To emit; to let flow.  
13\. To be liquid or fluid.  
14\. To be fusible; to melt.  
15\. To fuse; to melt.  
16\. To turn; as, a wheel runs on an axis or on a pivot.  
17\. To pass; to proceed; as, to run through a course of business; to run through life; to run in a circle or a line; to run through all degrees of promotion.  
18\. To flow, as words, language or periods. The lines run smoothly.  
19\. To pass, as time.

* * *

The lights came on and for several seconds. It blinded Sarah. She retreated toward Chuck, blinking, straining to hear. She heard footfalls. Heavy boots, several pairs. She could not make out the exact number, but at least three.

She heard a man clear his throat.

The glare in her eyes began to subside, her eyes adjusting to the light. Before her stood a large, thickly built man in BDUs, standing in front of three others.

As she blinked, she saw the man look at her, her robe, and saw his eyes flick to Chuck, still asleep, in his robe. The man's eyes returned to her and she could see the hint of a question in them.

And then, still blinking, she knew the man. John Casey, NSA. He was her counterpart in that Agency, with his own version of her reputation.

"Agent Casey?"

"Agent Walker?"

They regarded each other for a moment. It was clear he was looking at her as she was looking at him - each a funhouse mirror of the other, NSA :: CIA, man :: woman - he was on one side of the bars, she on the other.

Casey made a grunting noise - a semi-articulate. "Looks like you - the _two_ of you - are okay. I was afraid we would too late." He grunted again. Nice robe." He moved to the door of the cell, holding up the key so that she could see it. None of the others moved. No one had a weapon out, and Sarah noticed that two had no weapons at all. One had a medical kit, the other had what looked like a computer case.

Sarah stood combat-ready, but she nodded to Casey. He keyed the lock and the bars swung open. "You aren't in any danger now, Agent Walker - but _he_ is." Casey stepped out of the cell doorway and turned to the man with the medical kit. "Doctor."

The man moved forward. He stopped at the cell door and glanced at Sarah. She stepped back to the bed, and stole a quick glance at Chuck. Still asleep. Still? This could not have been what he planned for - he did not seem to be pretending.

Panic grabbed her. "Come on, hurry," she said to the man who moved quickly to Chuck's side. He put a hand on Chuck's shoulder and Sarah tensed, but all he did was shake him gently.

"Mr. Bartowski. Mr. Bartowski." The man looked up at her, standing beside him, then at Casey, who had taken one step into the cell. "He's in the early stages, as we feared. I can give him the drug; it will stabilize him. Then we need to get him to the Center."

Casey nodded. He looked at her. "We need to help him. That thing in his head will make him crazy or kill him."

She felt tears sting her eyes. She wiped at them and nodded at Casey.

She saw the hint of a question in his eyes again.

"Go ahead," he said to the doctor. Sarah watched, her stomach churning, as the man pulled up the arm of Chuck's robe and gave him an injection.

The doctor looked up. "Okay, let's get him in motion."

The other man entered the room and, helped by Casey, who took the medical kit, they gathered Chuck up, put his arms around their shoulders, and they left the cell.

Sarah started after them.

"Agent Walker, where are you going?" It was Casey.

"I'm going with him."

Casey eyed her carefully. "Why? I need you to stay here and help me figure this mess out. My boss, General Beckman, needs to talk to you. In fact, she now has operational control of this site and...this whole mess, so that means that for now, at any rate, she is your boss. Stay. Orders."

The men carrying Chuck were moving slowly, about to disappear into the hallway with him.

"Where are you taking him?"

"To a team of brain doctors. That Intersect thing in his head is a time bomb."

"How do I know you are not just taking him from one hole to another?"

Casey grunted. "You'll have to believe me."

"Would you believe me if the situation was reversed?"

Casey gave her another odd expression. "What is the situation, Agent Walker?" He gave her robe a pointed look.

Sarah felt Agent Walker's face go slack, expressionless. "What do you mean?" A hint of threat bled into her question.

Casey's eyebrows rose. "Well, I find you two in this...icebox...dressed like a honeymoon couple at a cheap motel…"

Sarah stood for a moment, silent and immobile. Then she turned and ran after Chuck. She heard Casey's heavy steps behind her - but he was not running.

She ran down a long hallway. At its end there was a door, just closing. She slammed into it, into the bar used to open it, and spilled into a lit control room.

Bodies and blood were on the ground - and Bryce.

Sarah skidded to a stop, unable to quite believe what she saw. Bryce was on the floor, dead, as was a woman beside him, a brunette in glasses, and another man, face-down. Casey opened the door and walked in.

"If you'd given me a moment, I would have told you…" Casey sounded apologetic.

Sarah stood, looking at the carnage. "We didn't hear…"

Casey nodded. "I'm good at what I do. We used silencers. They did not know we were coming but we couldn't take a chance. We came in hot. It was over in seconds." Casey surveyed the scene dispassionately, then looked at Sarah. "Weren't you and...pretty boy there, weren't you _partners_?" Casey's inflection of the term was almost identical to Chuck's earlier.

Sarah did not respond. She ran on to the next door. It took her into a large room, computers, and equipment lining the walls, and then through another door, up a long, steep staircase and, through a final door, outside.

She threw her hands up to cover her eyes. Daylight. The sun was unbearable, far brighter than the lights inside.

Reeling in the brightness, she turned to see Casey coming through the door she had just exited. The door was an entry to what looked like a small, corrugated tin outbuilding, the camouflaged entrance to the facility they had been in. She heard a chopper's engines behind her and she whirled around. Across a field was a helicopter, its rotors beginning to pick up speed. She sprinted toward it as fast as she could run. This time, she heard Casey behind her and he was running too.

She got to the helicopter just as it was leaving the ground and she sprang into the air, into the open side, and landed on her feet, pitched forward onto her hands, but righted herself. She felt Casey jump in too, but he crashed to the floor.

"Dammit, Walker, there would have been another chopper in a minute. Agents and a clean-up team are on their way here. We could have hitched a ride without this daredevil shit."

Sarah saw Chuck on a stretcher in the rear area and she moved to him, crouching down beside him. She reached out to touch his face and it struck her: she could _see_ him.

She let her hand settle on his cheek, then run down it. Then she reached up and ran her fingers into his curly hair. She hadn't expected that, the curls, but they pleased her, really pleased her. He personified his voice, even unconscious. He looked..._good_. Not in the sense of being good-looking, though he was, beautiful even, but in the sense of being good.

At the end of the stretcher, the man with the computer case had it open and was attaching electrodes to Chuck's head.

Sarah looked at him. "What are you doing?"

"We need to monitor brain activity and establish some baselines…"

Casey got into a seat and put on his harness. "Walker, get yourself fastened in. We don't need you to fall out."

Sarah moved to the seat nearest Chuck and put on the harness. She felt self-conscious about her robe. She pulled the bottom hem over her knees.

Casey was talking on a headset. He must have put it on while she adjusted her robe.

"Yes, ma'am, Agent Walker and Bartowski are okay. Unhurt anyway. Bartowski is unconscious. We are in the air, en route to the Center. ETA thirty minutes. Are you already there? Good. Yes, General."

Casey gave Sarah a look. "The team is ready, waiting for him."

Sarah nodded. "Where are we?"

"West Virginia - not too far from DC. An old CIA facility, shut down years ago, but of late a functioning Fulcrum base."

Sarah thought for a second. "So, they flew Chuck from LA to West Virginia?"

Casey nodded once and she saw one eyebrow go up at her use of 'Chuck'. "Yes, I'll explain once we are on the ground." He pursed his lips. "Or, General Beckman will."

Sarah reached out and took Chuck's hand, ignoring Casey's interrogative grunt.

* * *

Chuck did not regain consciousness on the flight and Sarah's panic increased. The doctor checked him twice and reassured her. Her heart was in her throat as the helicopter touched down on the helipad of a tall building on the very edge of DC.

The men got Chuck off the helicopter and onto a gurney two other men had ready. Standing off to the side was a short woman, middle-aged, with reddish hair. She was in uniform. Sarah would have known her anyway: General Beckman. They had never met, but Sarah recognized the head of the NSA.

Beckman watched as they carted Chuck to the door of an elevator. Sarah started to follow but Casey caught her arm. She turned to him, ready to attack him. He let go instantly. "You can catch up with him, Walker. You'll just be in the way. We need to talk to the General."

Beckman had stepped to them, standing between Sarah and the elevator.

Sarah slumped a bit. She saw the elevator doors close.

Beckman looked at Sarah's concerned face. "What happened between you two, Agent Walker?" Sarah heard Casey's interested, echoing grunt.

Before Sarah could decide what to say, the helicopter started again and the noise was deafening. Beckman waved at Sarah and Casey as she ducked down and headed to the elevator. Sarah and Casey ducked down too and followed. After a moment, the elevator doors opened. The elevator was empty. The three of them got on and Beckman hit the button for the second floor.

Beckman did not restart the conversation in the elevator. The three of them stood there in awkward silence. The elevator stopped and Beckman led them off it.

Sarah glanced around. They were walking down a gleaming hallway in what looked like a hospital, except that it was silent and orderly, the men and women in scrubs were at the desks or who walked past them all had an obvious military bearing.

Beckman arrived at an open door some distance from the elevator and she went in. Sarah followed her and Casey came in last, shutting the door behind them.

"Have a seat, Agents." Beckman sat down behind a large wooden desk. Chairs in front of it were the ones Beckman had in mind for Sarah and Casey. It was a nice but bare office.

Sarah sat down, again self-conscious about her robe. She had forgotten it again until she sat down. The General noticed. She picked up a phone from the desk. "Send me in a set of scrubs for a woman, tall, 5' 9" or so, thin. And can you come up with shoes? Size?"

She gave Sarah a questioning look. Sarah answered. "Nine and a half."

Beckman reported the size and hung up the phone. "They'll have something for you in a minute. You can change in the next room. Better than a robe."

Sarah nodded her agreement. She realized that she no longer felt cold, but she also no longer felt the particular warmth she felt near Chuck.

Beckman scrutinized Sarah. "I asked you a question upstairs, but I will wait for an answer; I think I understand.

"Let me tell you a little bit about what has been going on." Beckman blew out a weary breath, and only then did Sarah see the exhaustion in the woman's face, the dark around her eyes. "It's been the strangest few days in American intelligence history, I think."

Sarah glanced at Casey in the chair beside hers but his face seemed cut from stone, statuary.

"What do you mean?"

"Your Director, Langston Graham, is in custody, although the public has no knowledge of it yet. He was Fulcrum - he is, he was, Fulcrum's leader. And your partner, your former partner, Bryce Larkin, was his right-hand man."

The image of Bryce on the floor came back to Sarah's mind.

Beckman blew out another breath. She inhaled. "Let me explain from the beginning."

There was a knock on the door. Casey jumped up and opened it. A woman stood at the door, folded scrubs in her hands, topped by a pair of tennis shoes. Casey took the pile in two hands and shut the door with his foot. He handed the clothes and shoes to Sarah. She glanced up at Beckman, who waved to a door on the side of the office.

Sarah took the things, shut the door, and changed. She finished tying the shoes - not a bad fit - and went back into the office. Beckman was on the phone.

"Thanks for the update. That is encouraging."

Sarah took her seat again.

"That was the doctor. Mr. Bartowski is stable."

"I want to see him, General. Please."

"You will, soon enough. If there's any change, good or bad, they will call. Let me tell you what I need to tell you and ask you what I need to ask you." Beckman rubbed her face. "This all started because of a mission of yours, a mission to Budapest. I assume you remember."

The panic Sarah was already fighting down, her panic for Chuck, doubled, panic added for Molly, the little girl Sarah had left with her mother. Did Beckman know? Had Molly been found?

Beckman frowned. "I suppose that's not quite the way to put this. This all started because of your handler in Budapest, Ryker. He came back from that mission and soon began contacting various people we have atop our Watch Lists, bad people. We might never have noticed it if he had been careful about it, slower, more methodical, but he was in a rush. He had photographs, one of you, Agent Walker, the other of a...child.

"He was trying to find you, trying to enlist help, throwing money and weight around as much as he could. I put Major Casey in the field to follow him and I put a team of the best analysts to work on Ryker's record.

"They didn't have to dig for long before it became clear that Budapest was…off. The mission he sent you on was unsanctioned, some kind of deal worked out between Graham and Ryker.

"But now I need to back up again. Agent Walker, I have been suspicious of Langston Graham for some time, mainly because of the Intersect. Although he, like me, claimed to want it, he never seemed as willing to invest resources in finding it as I was. That puzzled me, because the whole idea seemed crazy to me, and I have never shared Graham's peculiar fantasy of _superagents_. I suppose that may be because I spent actual time in the field, whereas Graham rose in the ranks of the CIA never leaving a desk. I _know_ something about the stresses and strains of life...out there...in the dark."

Sarah thought she saw a flash of empathy in Beckman's eyes. "Anyway, I did my best to keep tabs on Graham, to watch what he was up to. One thing that puzzled me was why he refused, even when I once asked him point-blank, to use his best agent to find Fulcrum's Intersect, his Enforcer."

"He was cagey, always claiming that you were already on a mission, that it was not the best use of your skillset. He was always very hush-hush about you, proprietary even, as if you belonged to _him_ and not the agency. Later, I found out that he teamed you up with Bryce Larkin and I asked again, this time about the two of you going after the Intersect, but he told me you were already on a mission, somewhere in South America."

"Back to Ryker. Casey followed Ryker. He contacted several of his own sources but seemed to be spinning his wheels. My team of analysts came up with what I needed. They discovered buried back-channel communications between Ryker and Graham. The communications clarified that the Budapest mission had two purposes.

"One, they wanted the package," Beckman made eye contact with Sarah but left the phrase in place, "because of the money it would bring them, and, two, they were testing you. He intended the mission to end with you joining Fulcrum, to become a double-agent."

Sarah made a huffing sound and Beckman nodded.

"Sarah, Langston and I had a heart-to-truth-serum-heart talk, and I know all about it. You were for a long time a crucial part of Graham's cover. His use of you, his eradication of the CIA's most high-profile targets, made him seem above suspicion, ruthless but loyal.

"But he was playing a long game. Cultivating you for Fulcrum by using you for the CIA. He did not want to approach you about Fulcrum until he was sure. Graham brought Bryce Larkin in when Graham thought you were most approachable, had been made approachable, after a long series of one-woman deep cover assignments, and they intended to use your…_loyalty_ to Graham and your..._relationship_ with Bryce to bring you over to Fulcrum. But it was not working, or not working as fast as Bryce had led Graham to believe it would. As he would.

"Bryce left you to oversee Fulcrum's work on the Intersect. Fulcrum never perfected the Intersect, not even close, not like chatter made it seem as they had. It turns out that within a few days, every Fulcrum agent who volunteered or got conscripted into downloading it was deranged or dead…"

Sarah jumped up. "Chuck!"

"He is still okay, Agent Walker. Let me explain. What I just said is true, but it needs more explanation. It turns out that the ones who went crazy or who died did so after multiple downloads."

"Multiple? Why? Updates?"

"No. It turns out that the Intersect will not...well, I don't understand the technical stuff they have told me, let's just say that it...evaporates. It works for a time and then it fades away.

"Fulcrum thought it was still workable, so their idea was to make it portable enough for the agent to take it with him or her, to refresh it when necessary, about every twenty-four hours. But it turns out that multiple downloads damage the brain, causing psychosis or death. We don't think Chuck has had but the one download, the original one in Burbank…"

Sarah sat down but on the edge of her chair. "How long has it been since he downloaded it?"

"Over three days."

"But it was still working until a few hours ago. He told me. He said that it worked like a lie detector…"

"Yes, a flaw in the device. It turns out it works to detect lies in both the person heard and the person with it. Fulcrum's scientists could not figure out how to get it to do the first without doing the second, but they were loathe to give up on the feature, for obvious reasons.

But, yes, Chuck has held onto the Intersect for longer than anyone has so far. That is why Bryce sent it to him after sending a Fulcrum team to collect him once he downloaded it. We're waiting for him to wake up to find out where things stand…"

At that moment, the phone rang. Beckman picked it up. "Yes, Beckman. He's awake? Okay, I will be right down." Beckman hung up the phone. "Come with me. Mr. Bartowski is conscious." Beckman rose and, without looking back, led Sarah and Casey out of the room. They got on the elevator again and Beckman pushed the button for the basement. She turned to Sarah.

"Ryker is dead. Casey killed him yesterday. He would not be taken. He never found the package." Beckman again gave Sarah a significant look. Sarah nodded.

The elevator opened on another long, gleaming hallway, this one nearly deserted. But there were two soldiers, armed, who watched them get off the elevator. They went down the hallway to a room where another soldier stood. He stepped aside and Beckman opened the door. Sarah followed her in, Casey trailing behind her.

A team of doctors was standing in a group a distance from the bed. Chuck was on the bed, peering intently at the group, but he turned to face Sarah as they entered. She felt tremendous relief and excitement. Beckman walked to the bed.

"Mr. Bartowski, I fear you have been the victim of a rogue faction of spies known as Fulcrum. The Intersect was theirs, they engineered your download of it and your kidnapping. I'm General Diane Beckman, I oversee the NSA."

She put out her hand. Chuck took it and shook it, but looked dazed, lost.

"Oh. Um...Okay. Where am I?"

"In a top-secret hospital near DC."

Chuck got a funny look on his face. "As in Washington, DC?"

"Yes. Let me talk to your doctors, then we can talk more." Beckman walked into the group. They had stopped whispering and been listening to the exchange.

Sarah took Beckman's place at Chuck's side. "Chuck, thank God you are okay!" She put her arms around him as best she could and hugged him against her. He did not hug her back. She let go and backed up a step. "Chuck?"

"Um...Hi!" He gave her a weak, confused smile, his face and eyes otherwise blank. "Do I know you?"

* * *

...

* * *

Sarah entered her dark apartment heartbroken.

She did not bother to turn on the lights. She crossed to her couch and threw herself on it and cried the tears that had been darkening her vision since she ran, bolted, from Chuck's room.

As she cried, she thought about her final conversation with Beckman.

Bryce took Sarah and put her in the dark cell with Chuck. He and Graham had decided to test her again, to see if they could get her to come over to Fulcrum. Bryce thought she would do what they wanted, and that once she had, she would be easy to convince. Bryce had expected her to seduce Chuck, to save him, or to save herself if nothing else, and then they had hoped to use her having done so as leverage to force her to join them and to get her to become Chuck's Fulcrum handler. What had not happened in Budapest, Graham and Bryce expected to happen in DC, in the dark.

They kept Chuck in the dark for the reason Chuck thought: he would have known where they were; the facility was in the stolen CIA records that were part of the Intersect's data. But the worry was not so much that he would escape as that he would become unwilling to help if he suspected what was really happening. Fulcrum had not had time to prep another facility, although they were doing so and intended to move Chuck there.

The cold and the near-nakedness were to hasten the seduction, to break them both down. Fulcrum had discovered that the Intersect could not be forced to function; doing so would speed its fading. They needed Chuck willingly to help, so they needed Sarah to gain power over him - by any means necessary. She was to get him to want to help her, and the CIA, though he would have been helping her and Fulcrum. If Fulcrum could not use the Intersect to make super-agents, they would use it to make themselves a super-analyst - Chuck.

Bryce, though, was banking on Chuck being able to keep the Intersect, on it not fading, and part of the whole set-up was to see if that was right. Bryce had reason since college to think Chuck was a promising host for the Intersect.

Sarah had called to their captors just moments after Casey and his team, following information provided by Graham, raided the facility.

Sarah had heard it all in a daze of pain and hopelessness. Maybe she had not heard it right or understood it all. Everything Beckman had told her - from the beginning, really - had seemed jumbled to her; it was as if she could not adjust to the return of ordinary time, the return of light. All she knew was that she had reached the light but had then been consigned to the dark.

She felt like she had run into the dark and fused with it.

Before she left the Center, she grabbed a pen and a piece of paper from a nurse and scribbled a resignation letter, shoving it in Beckman's hand. When she left the facility - Casey drove her home - she was no longer an agent.

She had no conception of what she would do with herself, beyond crying.

When she got out of Casey's car, he leaned over toward her before she shut the door.

"I don't know what happened down there, but it meant something to you, and I guess it must have meant something to Bartowski before he...forgot. Sorry, _Sarah_; this job sucks so often I have no answer for why I keep doing it." He grunted sympathetically and she shut the door.

She did not leave the apartment for the next four days. She barely ate, barely slept, barely breathed. She just sat on her couch, the curtains drawn tight, and waited for the abyss to come and take her. She was void of will and she was willing to be void.

Voided.

On the fourth night, she showered. She could not abide her own odor any longer. The warm water made her cry again. She stood in it until it she could stand it no more, then she got out. She dried herself and crawled, naked, into her bed.

She had spent the previous nights in a ball on her couch.

She turned out the light on her nightstand. For a moment in the resulting dark, she pretended she was still in that freezing cell, still with Chuck, on their bed.

But then she heard a sound. She thought of her comment to Chuck - _once an assassin, always an assassin_. Had someone come for her so soon?

She started to move her hand to the gun beneath her pillow, always there, but she stopped. She had been ready to die for a long time. _Why not now?_ She moved her hand away from the gun.

She heard her apartment door click shut. Footsteps moved in the dark, and she saw a beam of light. The footsteps reached her bedroom door. She had pushed it halfway closed before she took her clothes off to shower.

She heard it being pushed open.

Her feet were cold, she noticed, absurdly. She would have liked to die with warm feet. Blowing out a breath soundlessly, she relaxed, waiting.

The overhead light clicked on.

Sarah blinked.

Chuck was standing there, a half-smile on his face.

"I admit, Sarah, I didn't think I would get this far. I spent some time one summer in college working with a locksmith but I'm rusty. I expected you to end me at the door."

Her mouth fell open. "Chuck? You _know_ me?"

"How could I _forget_ you, Sarah Walker?"

"But at the Center..."

"At the Center, I came to before the doctors realized I did. I heard them talking, debating, theorizing. I realized the only way out of this was to make them think it was gone, the Intersect."

"You mean it's not?'

The other half of his smile joined the earlier half, and he tapped his temple. "Nope, still here, but, as far as I can tell, functioning fine now. Rebooted, I guess. So, yeah, I'm good. No pain, unless I tell a lie."

She shook her head, almost dizzy. "But you've been telling lies for...days."

His smile weakened a bit. "Yeah, I know." He held out his hands. Even across the room, she could see a host of small, half-moon-shaped wounds on his palms.

He gave her a pained look. "I'm so sorry I hurt you, but for them to believe it, the most important thing was that you did."

"I had to dig my nails into my hands to keep from giving it away, but, hey, it turns out I should have stayed in that theater class at Stanford. I've got talent. They're done with me, the government. I'm free. Turns out you really can't _force_ the Intersect to work."

Sarah grinned, though she did not understand what he was talking about as far as Stanford went. _Theater? _

All she knew was that her feet were warm. She was warm. She _felt _all over. Her four-day numbness was gone.

She looked at Chuck and saw him studying her, her face, and then the outline of her body beneath her thin sheet. Her temperature shot up more.

"I hear you are no longer an agent."

She nodded, letting it all sink in. "I hear you are no longer a government asset."

He nodded. "So, what next?"

"I'd like to move someplace warm, maybe...Burbank?"

"That could be arranged, I dare say. What would you do?"

"Well, I have enough money for a while. And for a while, I would want to do nothing except spend time with my boyfriend."

He looked crestfallen. He had acting talent. But she could see the gleam in his brown eyes. "So, you already have a boyfriend in California?"

"Yes, but he's in DC at the moment."

Chuck looked at her under the sheet again and shook his head. "He's one lucky man."

Sarah frowned just a little, but happily. "I don't know, I'm a project, a puzzle. It won't be easy."

"That's okay, Sarah, I love to work puzzles - and I'm fantastic at it."

"Is that so? Why don't you come here and work on one of mine right now?" She could hear the upsurge of husky desire in her voice, a match for what she saw in his eyes.

"Really?"

"Really."

He put out his hand to turn off the light.

"No, Chuck. Leave it on."

* * *

THE END

**_Labyrinth_**

* * *

"Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from _one _side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about." -Ludwig Wittgenstein, _Philosophical Investigations _203

* * *

A/N: Many thanks to Beckster1213 for pre-reading.

An odd little novella, no doubt. As I hope was obvious to everyone, the _what _mattered more here than the _why: _what happened between them in the dark was the story's foreground, its salient feature, why (and how) they ended up there mattered far less. Interesting story to write.

Any final thoughts? So long, folks!

Zettel


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